Newspaper

My husband likes to google stuff. Some is intentional searching and some of it is just random. Something looks interesting, so he dives in. One day he says to me, “Do you know the meaning of the word newspaper?” I’m like, “What do you mean? A newspaper is a newspaper. Writers report current events and whatever else they deem worthy of publishing.” And my husband is like, “No, what it stands for.” Curious, I said, “I have no idea. What does it stand for?” "North east west south past and present events report."

Now that’s a mouth full. It makes me wonder how many other words have acronyms that I don’t know about. But why make an acronym for a word like newspaper? Doesn’t it speak for itself? Having typed all this, I googled the newspaper acronym to look for more information, and it turns out it is false (which didn’t surprise me). Apparently, it started on Facebook in 2019 and some of these things stick around to mess with our true facts.

The lesson today? Many of us love to surf the net and discover new things, but no matter what we want to believe, we can’t believe everything we see on social media or random googling. Be careful of your sources. Fact check the things you really need to know. Don’t blindly wander the web and trust that all the information out there is truth. Happy – safe – digging!

Politifact, Snopes.com