The Ever-Helpful Acronym Trivia Quiz

Answer: Sealed with a kiss

SWAK goes back to at least 1918, when homesick Doughboys serving in France wrote to their sweethearts back in the U.S. They included the acronym SWAK on the envelopes, so that said sweethearts would know that the flame of love burned bright. The tradition continued through the Second World War.

Answer: Situation normal, all fouled up

SNAFU is believed to have originated with the U.S. army during the Second World War. According to www.snafu.com, the term originated in 1941 with Army Signal Corpsmen Don Taylor and Johnny Paup who were stationed at Camp San Luis Obispo, California. They were using a new coding machine that converted messages into five-letter words, and one night the two were playing around with making up sentences that the words might represent. SNAFU was one of the code words, and it was Don Taylor who translated it to "Situation normal, all fouled up." (That's the polite version, by the way).

However, American electronics engineers claim that both SNAFU and its counterpart FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition - again, that's the cleaned-up version) were in use before the Second World War by telephone repairmen who were sent out to repair public telephone booths.

In order to make their reports on arrival at the damaged booths, often over a very bad line, the repairmen resorted to the acronyms to indicate the degree of damage. None of them, I understand, ever claimed to have found any silky nighties and frilly undies in the damaged booths, nor did they sling mud at Fordham University or report sweet nothings and fond urges. Nowadays, SNAFU continues to be used to describe any ongoing mess.

Answer: Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was founded in 1960 at the Baghdad Conference, and the five founding members are Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. The founding five were later joined by other oil-producing nations: Qatar (1961), Indonesia and Libya (1962), the United Arab Emirates (1967), Algeria (1969), Nigeria (1971), Ecuador (1973) and Gabon (1975). Ecuador and Gabon later withdrew from membership in 1992 and 1994 respectively. OPEC is headquartered in Vienna and its mandate is to control the number of barrels of oil on the world market at any given time.

Their influence was particularly felt during the energy crisis of the 1970s.

Answer: Latin

When written correctly, a.m. and p.m. are set in lower case with punctuation, and they are acronyms for ante meridem (Latin for before noon), and post meridem (Latin for after noon). The terms were first used in the seventeenth century at the Royal Greenwich Observatory near London.

The word noon, incidentally, is derived from the Latin 'nona hora' which referred to the ninth hour of daylight. Noon used to be around 2:00 p.m., until the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich decided to package the day into two sets of twelve hours each.

The stroke of 12 midnight initiates a.m., and the stroke of 12 noon ushers in p.m.

Answer: Port Out Starboard Home

There is no real reason to believe that Posh originally meant Port Out, Starboard Home, because no reference to the term has ever been discovered in the records of any shipping line. It was thought to have originated in the days before air-conditioning aboard sea-going vessels, especially those bound from the U.K. to the Far East.

Naturally, the cabins on the port side of the ship would be cooler on the outward bound trip, and the starboard side cabins would be cooler on the trip back to Blighty.

The first known use of posh is found in the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it as a noun meaning 'a dandy' originating in 1890. Today, we use posh to describe anything luxurious - or David Beckham's wife.

Answer: Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile

ICBM, of course, is the dreaded Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile. The SLBM, the submarine-launched ballistic missile, was equally deadly and was the subject of much discussion during SALT I.

Answer: Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began in Helsinki in 1969 and continued until 1972, between the United States and the Soviet Union. The first round - SALT I - focussed on freezing the establishment of ICBM launch sites at the existing level, and prohibited the establishment of SLBM sites until an equal number of ICBM sites had been shut down.

The second round of SALT - SALT II - was a continuation of SALT I and dealt with curtailing the manufacture of specific nuclear weapons. SALT II was signed by Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter in Vienna in 1979. Six months later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the treaty was never ratified by the American government.

However, both sides adhered to the terms of the agreement. Some historians maintain that this was the beginning of the end for the Societ Union. I always chuckled when I heard newscasters referring to the SALT talks, which is a bit like saying pizza pie!

Answer: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

The first recorded use of the term WASP was in a 1957 article by Queen's College, New York political science professor Andrew Hacker. It came into common usage after the publication of sociologist E. Digby Baltzell's 1964 book 'The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America'.

The term originally denoted Yankees, Americans of north-western European origin who were descended from colonial settlers, but it has come to mean people with several generations of old money behind them - the Roosevelts, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Cabots, Lodges and so on.

Answer: North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NATO had its beginnings in the Western European Union formed in 1949 by Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands and the U.K. as a interdependent defence alliance in the early years of the Cold War. Later, in 1952, the membership was expanded to include Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, and the United States, and Greece and Turkey joined in 1955.

In 1954, the Soviet Union applied for membership, but was turned down, and in 1955 the Soviet Union and the Communist states of Eastern Europe formed the Warsaw Pact. Since the fall of the Communist Bloc, membership in NATO has expanded to include 26 countries, many of which were former Warsaw Pact members.

The original Western European Union grew into the European Union, which is an economic alliance rather than a military one.

Answer: W.H. Smith, British booksellers and stationers

It was W.H. Smith who first began using the Standard Book Number as a way of maintaining stock records in 1966. The system was adopted as the international standard in 1970, so now it is the International Standard Book Number.