I think this board (and I thank arnie for that!) is about the only place where I see initialism and acronym used correctly. Nearly everywhere else calls everything an acronym. Indeed, initialism is redlined when I type, indicating it isn't a word in their system.
Interesting. Although the American and British corpora show roughly the same results, there's an little bump between 1865 and 1872 for initialism in British English. Since acronyms and initialisms were uncommon during the 19th century anyway, I wonder if someone coined the word with a different meaning then?
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
