DH and other abbreviations (was What's Love Got To Do With It?)

[Martha]

Jen: 

> I know I'm going to feel silly for asking, but what does dh 
> mean?
> The only thing I could think of was "designated husband" which 
sounds 
> a *tad* unromantic, huh?

Martha: 

I'm glad you asked that - I'd been wondering too. Whenever I saw it 
written down I automatically read it as "division head", stemming 
from my days as the *worst ever* Camp America participant. I don't 
know if this is something that all summer camps do or if it was just 
the one I worked on, but if they could abbreviate something then they 
did - so division head was DH (as in "Heather is DH of Naomi"), being 
on duty was OD, senior counsellor was SC, and so on and so forth. So 
when people on this list started referring to their DHs, I was 
slightly confused.

Speaking of confusing abbreviations, I'm currently doing lots and 
lots of reading for my third-year project, which is on discourse 
analysis. In a number of the texts I have read, discourse analysis is 
abbreviated to DA, which makes sense, but means I get mixed up, and 
end up reading things wrong. Examples:

"The only thing he really looked forward to were the discourse 
analysis meetings, and they would have to stop over the holidays, as 
nearly everybody in the discourse analysis would be spending time 
with their families..." (OoP, p399 UK ed)

OR

"Overall, then, Dumbledore's army proposes that people's language use 
is much more variable than is indicated by the widely 
held 'realistic' descriptive model of language..." (J Potter (!) and 
M Wetherell, 1987: p35)

Dammit.

~ Martha, who is certainly *not* married, but would gladly join in 
the discussion if she were. :-)