Down the Mouse Hole

Youngest son has just completed his master’s degree in computer science but he was stumped the other evening when his friends asked “what is the plural of mouse as in a computer mouse?”

It almost seems too obvious – surely it’s mice, but then again, it doesn’t sound exactly right.

image from the National Cyber Security Centre website

When would you ever need to use the word in the plural, you only have one attacked to your computer, if indeed you even bother these days with the scrolly bit built into a laptop?  (I confess I wondered the other day what happened to all the mouse-mats in the world???)

Neither of us could decide on an answer and so we were driven to the font of all knowledge – Google.

In computer terms, a mouse is a corded or wireless device that moves your computer's cursor while you move the mouse. In most cases, the plural of mouse is "mice," but more than one computer mouse can also be called "mouses."

A definitive answer? Well maybe or maybe not because as you scroll further.

MOUSE is an acronym, and is short for Manually-Operated User-Selection Equipment so technically MOUSE is already the plural 

However, the inventor of this essential piece of equipment disputes this.

When asked who named his most famous invention, Doug Engelbart recalled, “No one can remember. It just looked like a mouse with a tail, and we all called it that.” 

And this is where an inevitable rabbit (or should I say mouse hole) opened up as I took my searching away from the computer jargon to being word nerdy.

If it was called a mouse because of its shape, the acronym M.O.U.S.E. was in fact a BACKRONYM.

An acronym deliberately formed from a phrase whose initial letters spell out a particular word or words, either to create a memorable name or as a fanciful explanation of a word's origin.

Backronym was definitely a new word to me and I delighted in this new bit of not quite useless information to drop into any conversation. Especially when on further reading I discovered another new word INITIALISM

An abbreviation consisting of initial letters pronounced separately (e.g. BBC )

Youngest son was perhaps more perplexed than ever, but I’d lost him somewhere along the way in the tunnels of the ever-expanding mouse hole. 

Meanwhile I was suddenly content with my new found knowledge and repeated the words, acronym, backronym and initialism as I drifted off in peaceful slumber.

 ooooooo

If you enjoy finding our about new words and their meanings here's a word related book recommendation: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams.

I recently listened to this as an audio book and it is a superb novel set at the turn of the twentieth century with the backdrop of the suffragette movement leading up to the first world war.

It is the story of Esme who grows up sitting beneath the table of the scriptorium in Oxford where her father works as part of the team compiling a definitive dictionary. Esme collects scraps of discarded words, saving them so they are not forgotten; women’s words and common words that don’t have the academic gravitas to fit into a scholarly dictionary.

It's well worth a read or a listen!