BAN - Ban Acronyms Now
August 5th, 2006Ubiquitous acronyms
Acronyms are abbreviations made from the initial letters of a series of words. They sound a barbaric hacked sound. They look an ugly uppercase look. They mean a cryptic jargonic meaning. And they are taking over the world. They have already conquered most technological niches, from computers to genetics, from astrophysics to psychiatry, from oil-drilling to meteorology. Blessed are those who can avoid them on their workplace. Let me just quote a fragment of the acronymic gobbledygook that I have to read through on a daily basis:
INR RMS performance is impacted by RWA and SADM microvibrations, MISA scan residuals, ARW from the IRU, IRES and LIASS noise-induced AOCS jitter, as well as parallax effects due to E/W and N/S orbital position errors.
Even within my very restricted caste of space systems engineers, I doubt many can grasp more than half of the above. I agree that the meaning is technically difficult, but the sentence could at least evoke something, so that people could have a clue what the text is about. Acronyms make sure that only the very few initiates can get the meaning, generally the four people working on this particular system at this particular moment.
If the use of acronyms was limited to technical jargon on the workplace, it could still be considered a necessary tribute to fast-paced technologies, where we do not have time to spell-out the complete definitions, or alternatively create new words. Unfortunately, these evil creatures are spreading everywhere and invading everyday life: ATMs, IQ, VCRs, SUVs, OBGYs, MP3, DVDs, RnB, FAQs, UFOs, RIP, etc.
What if our forebears had done the same ?
How whould we be speaking now if people had always been too lazy to use the real words when they existed, or to make up new ones when necessary ? In my late teens, I remember reading pirate novels and other sea stories, lush with nautical terms and descriptions: although I understood little of the vocabulary (and it hardly helped to look up the French words), there was a poetic sound to it, a vivid evocation, an image that could get my imagination roaming. Next is a quote from Jack London’s ‘The Sea-Wolf’ [1], where I have imagined what it would have looked like with today’s acronym frenzy.
This:
And such a tangle — halyards, sheets, guys, down-hauls, shrouds, stays, all washed about and back and forth and through, and twined and knotted by the sea. I cut no more than was necessary, and what with passing the long ropes under and around the booms and masts, of unreeving the halyards and sheets, of coiling down in the boat and uncoiling in order to pass through another knot in the bight, I was soon wet to the skin.
becomes this:
And such a tangle — R2LSs, RATSs, RLCSs, RLHDSs, FRMs, RWSM, all washed about and back and forth and through, and twined and knotted by the LBSW. I cut no more than was necessary, and what with passing the long ST2 under and around the SEFSs and S3, of unreeving the R2LSs and RATSs, of coiling down in the VTW and uncoiling in order to pass through another KNOT in the MASR, I was soon wet to the OCLT.
If you still want people to be able to write novels in the future, you had better boycott acronyms right now; and use real words instead. Dig out old ones or make up new ones, but words.
Read on
Read away
[1] Jack London’s ‘The Sea-Wolf’ ebook
Excellent, as usual. I often think this, and it makes me crazy. It is one of the reasons I worked so hard to get the WordPress Semantics article written for the WordPress Codex. I wanted to make sure we all knew the words we were using. My friend, Michael Hampton, did a fabulous job on that, helping all of understand the jargon of blogging and WordPress. Another Michael, Michael D. Adams, worked overtime to “name” all the parts and pieces of WordPress, making sure each part had a label.
It’s important to call things what they are, but it is also important to name things so they are unique, which is one of my major bitches. WordPress has Pages that are web pages or rather posts that become web pages that aren’t really posts but Pages because they behave differently than web pages because they are Pages. STUPID. Or site map versus sitemap. Site Map is a page with links to the articles and posts on your site or blog, like a table of contents. A sitemap is a coded version of all the links on your blog used to upload to Google and other search engines and directories to help them crawl your site. STUPIDSTUPID. And don’t get me started on widgets. ARGHH!
People who have such incredible imagination and creativity when it comes to developing code and technology, are often absolutely brain dead and unimaginatively stupid when it comes to naming their creative developments.
Sometimes, the best words for a new concept have absolutely nothing to do with the concept: you actually decide a meaning for something that has none whatsoever (not even a hint).
An example from fundamental physics: elementary particle were often named for their (alleged) properties: an electron creates electricity, a neutron has no electric charge, a lepton is supposed to be less heavy, a photon carries light. But in 1961, Murray Gell-Mann, working on a classification of hadrons, for want of better naming scheme, recycled the term ‘quark’ from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The word ‘quark’ tells nothing of what a quark is, yet no physicist ever gets mistaken as to its meaning.
So you could very well invent a complete Wordpress bestiary with new words: ‘Pages that are […] because they are Pages’ could be named ‘greepies’ or ‘hustlefinks’ or ‘thwarflers’ or ‘jiwi-oonakhoustae’ and once the wordpress codex tells us what they really are, we’d get used to it.
Oh, gosh, I feel your acronym pain. Because I work with programmers and other techies, I see acronym after acronym day after day. It doesn’t matter that the company style guide says not to use acronyms–they use them all the time. In fact, they create acronyms for every product that company makes, and since it’s one of the biggest companies in the world, that’s legions of product names. The saddest part of acronyms is that there are some like radar and laser, that people don’t even recognize are acronyms any more.
Years ago at an aerospace company in Los Angeles we had a temporary secretary (back when typewriters were the main secretarial tool) who was asked to type up some handwritten notes. The writer used “TM” as short for telemetry and noted to the typist to “spell out” that acronym wherever it appeared. She wasn’t familiar with aerospace terms so she translated it as “transcendental meditation”.
I believe we need to focus the ban on TLAs - three letter acronyms. They are the worst…
I’d rather have three-letter acronyms than ten-letter acronyms, but I agree.
This is funny. However; even historically we always used acronyms, but not in novels! Take for instance the word OK, it stands for Objection Killed according to history. In technology we have over used acronyms, but I don’t think we should not use them as they become part of the lingo.
There are apparently a thousand origins to the word OK. Let’s write it okay, then it is an acronym no more and everyone’s happy.
I’m an etymology enthusiast. I’ve never come across the origin for OK as “Objection Killed”. Did you invent this, or can you provide a citation?
The earliest written occurrence of “OK” was (believe it or not) a “cute” way of spelling the phrase All Correct as “Oll Korrect” (reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okay#Oll_korrect). This was part of a general fad of comical misspellings.
Other such misspellings were “OW” for “oll wright”, and “K.Y.” for “know yuse”.