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I don't use SWAG in my teaching. However, my curiosity was up, and i=
t's
Friday, so I did some Googling.
There seems no doubt that WAG predominantly means wild-assed guess.
However there is considerable discrepancy over what s stands for. He=
re
are some common ones...
scientific, smart, sophisticated, super, silly, sheer, stupid, someon=
e's
SWAG is even in some on-line dictionaries, and they tend to dual defi=
ne
it as scientific or silly.
Some other possibilities, also in acronym dictionaries, include... so=
ld
without guarantee, standard written agreement, still wondering and
guessing, stuff we all get, shit we all get, and more... some pretty
crude.
I have found that some students seem to be genuinely hurt when
professors use words or acronyms that have "bad" words in them. When=
I
was younger, and wanted to make a point, I might have said, "This isn=
't
just small, it's damn small." But about every time I have said
something like that I have had a student come up after class and ask =
me
not to swear in class. Personally I never thought damn was that bad,
and was surprised students reacted to it. One the other hand, I know
students who would react badly to damn but then use the word friggin =
in
almost every sentence. I myself would never use that word.
Go figure. (That doesn't mean anything bad does it?)
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry and Physics
Bluffton College
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu