"Soap Speak" Acronyms
Soap Opera Digest coined the term and popularized the use of "soap speak," in which show names are abbreviated as acronyms to save space. These abbreviations have come into more extensive use outside of the magazine with the advent of internet chat rooms and message boards.
For example, current soap operas and their acronyms include General Hospital (GH), The Bold and the Beautiful (B&B), and The Young and the Restless (Y&R). Days of our Lives is referred to as DAYS in the magazine, though the acronym DOOL is sometimes used elsewhere; General Hospital: Night Shift is similarly designated SHIFT rather than an acronym. Now-defunct series include All My Children (AMC), As the World Turns (ATWT), and One Life to Live (OLTL). The now-defunct series Sunset Beach (1997–1999) was known as BEACH to differentiate it from the previously-cancelled series Santa Barbara (1984–1993), which itself had been referred to as SB. Other past series with single-word titles (like Loving and Passions) are fully capitalized but not typically abbreviated. Prime time soap operas have also been attributed with acronyms and abbreviations in the magazine, including Melrose Place (MP) and Dynasty (DYN).
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Famous quotes containing the words soap and/or speak:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)