Studio engineers, recording enthusiasts, musicians and journalists. I hereby call your attention to an issue of utmost importance. It is something that has niggled for as long as I have been writing about studio recording techniques, and I have yet to find a solution to it. I call upon us, here, now, to finally clean up this ambiguity once and for all, lest I never sleep a good night’s sleep for the rest of my days.
Friends, what exactly is the appropriate abbreviation of the word “microphone”? Is it mic? Or mike? My sense of rationality dictates that a suitable abbreviation for a word does not incur a re-imagining of the word itself, and therefore renaming it to “mike” seems faintly ridiculous. And so I much prefer “mic”, despite its erroneous phonetic pronunciation. But then we run into trouble as soon as we start talking about “micing”, or “mic’ing”, or “miking” – a non-OED word invented by sound engineers to describe the act of shoving a microphone some place, which incurs a total overhaul of the original word in order to scan properly. The word “micing” looks wrong, feels wrong and almost suggests some kind of bizarre cooking reference, “mic’ing” forces a descent into the kind of apostrophe retardation normally reserved for market stall sellers of “CD’s”, and “miking”, although phonetically accurate, declares an abandonment of the convention of the word microphone. In all recent writings I have taken the reluctant decision that the only logical interpretation of this chaos is that microphones are “mics” and drums are “miked” in the process of “miking”. However, I am in no way satisfied with this maverick approach to spelling, and find myself on occasions such as this wasting everybody’s time in an unwitting fit of grammatical anxiety. So, can we please – please – have some consensus on this? If the “they” committee would like to organise a board meeting regarding this important subject, I think it would be beneficial for everyone.
4 Responses
Rationality isn’t always followed! When “Michael” is shortened, preserving the original vowel sound, it’s always spelled “Mike”, not “Mic”.
You make a good point. 👍
A mic is as good as a mile. C following I is almost always a soft C and pronounced as an S. And _i_ is inevitably a short I. Mike is the true pronunciation.
A Coca-Cola is not a Coc.
Nuclear is not a nuc.
A favorite is not a fav.
A refrigerator is not a frig.
A bicycle is not a bic.
The list goes on and on. Abbreviations are traditionally written for pronunciation, not to maintain original spelling.
Hmm. You make a convincing case. So why does the abbreviation “mike” still seem inelegant to me? Maybe it’s because of the semi-standardisation of the word “mic” on literally every electronic device with a microphone input. See here, for example. So despite the phonetic catastrophe of this spelling, in day-to-day life it is far more common to see microphone abbreviated to “mic” than “mike”, making it an exception to the rule that you point to, and therefore placing it in the same category of abbreviation anomalies as “no.” for “number”, “e.g.” for “example”, and “xmas” for “Christmas”. This counters your claim that abbreviations are traditionally written for pronunciation; sometimes they are, but sometimes, demonstrably, they’re not.