It's Not an Acronym

[kevin_standlee]

I wonder why so many places where I see references to the top honors in the SF/F field presented by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention, the writers of the articles feel compelled to style it "HUGO Award" as if "HUGO" was an acronym. The "Hugo" in "Hugo Award" isn't an acronym. As I hope everyone reading my journal regularly knows, the Award is named for Hugo Gernsback, sometimes called "the father of modern science fiction."

At this rate, I reckon we'll see people trying to back-form a "real" name for the Awards that somehow fits into the letters H-U-G-O.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Actually, that's not true. The official name of the Hugo Award is "Hugo Award" and has been since the mid-1990s when we abandoned the nominal "Science Fiction Achievement Award" name. That name appears one last time in the Constitution as a sop to people who didn't want to face the reality (we couldn't get a service mark registration on SFAA because it was considered two generic), but all of the other references were removed, and the order inverted so that "Science Fiction Achievement Award" is, more or less, a nickname for the Hugo Award.

The Mark Protection Committee does not try to protect SFAA references and it's not in the list of declared service marks.