ALPHABET SOUP

When my kids were in elementary school we often had soup for lunch. That's if we lived close enough for them to come home for their midday meal.


Our old standby was Cream of Tomato Soup, served with a toasted cheese sandwich. Warm, filling, yummy.

I tried other flavors of soup--some, as you might expect, went over better than others. Bean and Bacon was tasty. Chicken and Rice was merely okay. Beef and Vegetable was acceptable.

A fun meal was Alphabet Soup, so-called because the little bits of pasta were in the shapes of letters of the alphabet. I always thought that was a clever way to get kids to eat as well as help them identify their letters.

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In college-level history classes I learned that Alphabet Soup had a totally different meaning: it was a handy way to refer to all the government acronyms (and other references) that had emerged during the 20th Century. I recognized WPA and CCC from the 1930s (read about those--wasn't born yet); AWOL, WAC, WAF, GI, SNAFU from the 40s when I got old enough to know some of my cousins who'd been in the military; then, when I became aware of political stuff, there was FDR, and later on JFK and others.

This shorthand way of speaking had been around for quite some time. And it's still with us.

Fast-forward to the late 20th Century and the advent of Internet. Once we got into the swing of email, we had a whole new way to communicate:

LOL - laughing out loud
TTYL - talk to you later
TTYS - talk to you soon
BTW - by the way

Soon folks were talking about WIPs and UFOs. I wasn't sure about the WIPs, but I knew about UFO's--they'd been all the talk in the 40s and 50s, along with crop circles and movies about aliens invading Earth.

How wrong I was! UFOs, folks, are UnFinished Objects.

WIPs, used in many circles, meant Works in Progress; or if you were in accounting, Works in Process.

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I asked my oldest daughter, who has made quilts for many years, to share her treasury of alphabet soup. Besides WIPs and UFOs, here are some I especially like:

BDNQ: Bad Day, Not Quilting

HIPS: Hundreds of Ideas Piling Skyward

HSY: Haven't Started Yet

PIGS: Projects in Grocery Sacks

SABLE: Stash Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy

TGIF: Thank God It's Finished

WOMBAT: Waste of Money, Batting, and Time

WIWMI: Wish It Would Make Itself

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BDNQ could easily be adapted to anything: Bad Day, Not Reading (BDNR); or Bad Day, Not Napping (BDNN); or maybe Bad Day, Not Shopping (BDNS).

On second thought, I'll not use that one--don't like to call any day a "bad" day. Gotta be a silver lining somewhere.

No doubt you've developed some of your own Alphabet Soup to use in emails or snail mails or messages on the family white board.

Until next time, TTYL, keep LOL, and BTW, have a blessed week!