"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).
Read more about this topic: Soap Opera Digest
Famous quotes containing the words soap and/or speak:
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)
“Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)