"WHO is who it is"
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Recent events invite a reprise of the famous Abbot and Costello skit — and Josh Johnson has obliged:
The skit wouldn't work for the Organisation mondiale de la Santé in French, or the Organización Mundial de la Salud in Spanish, since OMS is not a word in either language. The Russian abbreviation (ВОЗ) doesn't lend itself to jokes either, as far as I can tell — readers may be able to tell us about options for Chinese and Arabic.
German, Japanese, Portuguese, Hindi, etc. are not among the languages that WHO offers:
Presumably WHO follows the United Nations in this:
Coby said,
February 1, 2025 @ 5:48 pm
I think воз means 'cart' in Russian. Its cognates in other Slavic languages mean some sort of conveyance (e.g. 'train' in Serbian and Macedonian), but I don't think any others use it as an acronym for WHO,
David Marjanović said,
February 1, 2025 @ 7:02 pm
It's not a joke, but German consistenly uses UNO instead of UN for the "United Nations Organization", pronounces it as a word and assumes it is, fittingly, "1" in various Romance languages. The WHO gets no such interpretation and is boringly pronounced by the names of its letters: [ʋehaˈ(ʔ)oː].
KeithB said,
February 3, 2025 @ 9:29 am
There was also the George Bush "Hu's on first" routine:
https://www.yellowbridge.com/humor/husonfirst.php
Entretien ménager Litya said,
February 5, 2025 @ 8:47 pm
Le Parti vous a dit de rejeter le témoignage de vos yeux et de vos oreilles. C'était leur commandement final et le plus essentiel. » 1984 George Orwell.