While I'm in the country of usage, I want to return to an issue I aired on this blog seven and a half years ago. (Seven and a half years, would you believe! Why is it that blogging seems not to inhabit real time but some other kind of universe in which much of it seems like yesterday, or indeed all posts are simultaneous with each other and capable of being referenced 'sideways' as if from one page in a book to another? Anyway...) That was the issue of why the evidently better practice of calling science fiction 'SF' for short had to compete with the evidently worse practice of calling it 'sci fi' (ouch). At the time, I wrote about my preference in this matter as being a prejudice I had, which I couldn't really justify by argument; and my post on the subject produced some follow-up email correspondence which I duly posted as well.
Readers, I'm here to tell you that I've now thought of an argument in favour of my prejudice preference. 'Sci fi' is supposed to abbreviate 'science fiction', but it is spoken as if it rhymes with 'hi fi'. What kind of sense does that make? If I say 'in the circs', I wouldn't pronounce 'circs' to rhyme with, say, 'larks', so that it came out 'sarks'. If I say 'peeps', I don't rhyme it with 'hopes' and call them 'popes'. And so on, you get the picture. Accordingly, 'sci fi' ought to be said as if the second syllable was the beginning of the word 'fiction'. But no one says it like that. It would sound silly, as if it had been interrupted by a sponge suddenly being thrust into the mouth of the speaker. From now on I'll be urging this silly pronunciation upon all who say 'sci fye', in the hope of shaming them towards the more elegant 'SF'.