Rant: abbreviations!

cwbullet said:

Good points. After years in the military, I have begun to hate overlapping abbreviations. MI can mean myocardial infarction or military intelligence.

Click to expand...

I believe the first exists, but not the second...
Kind of like metal woods in golf...

Great to see threads like this bring out the pedant in us .

TLAs can be so context sensitive. I was recently doing a PPT presentation for work and it mentioned the TIA. That is a communications standards group, nothing at all to do with strokes. Of course, using mass spectrometers to investigate multiple sclerosis can be confusing too. Sensitive to both target audience and context.

Abbreviations can make for some interesting reading sometimes. When talking about carbon nanotubes, typically in research papers, the abbreviation is CNT. When you get researchers, particularly with English as their second language, they apply the same logic to talking about copper nanotubes. I will leave you to ponder the relevant offensive abbreviation .

My personal pet peev (one of them anyway) is people who put full-stops after contractions. If a word is contracted (bits cut out of the middle but starting and ending letters are the same) then no "." is used. eg. "Saints vs Sinners".

* TLA = Three Letter Acronym

So you are not a fan of made up ones, I get it.

I'm assuming SNAFU and FUBAR are in your playbook, yes?

Sorry, GTG to LUNAR. Hopefully no RUDs or CATOs!!!

cerving said:

https://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/textmessageabbreviations.asp#R

Click to expand...

Ha,,
Get A Life..
I knew dat..
I was just testin you..
I hafta make sure you're on yur toes..

Teddy

True story....

One of the things we do at my job is to run outdoor programs for kid's groups...generally middle school aged. At the end of each program we have them fill out evaluation forms... with questions like, "what did you learn about yourself/the place/others?", "what was your favorite lesson?", "what did you like best/worst?", "how was the food?", "what you would change or add", etc. Of course, a lot of the kid's handwriting, spelling, and grammar is simply atrocious these days, and of course they use a LOT of "text speak" and abbreviations. Most of the kids are great, often really thoughtful and smart, and engaged. But there's always a few that are....let's say "challenging".

There was one that particularly stood out. The kid answered every single question with "IDK" (which stands for "I don't know").....with one exception. The only question he bothered to actually write a response to was "What new thing did you learn?". His answer?......."I already learned all this last year".

facepalm,
s6

Mushtang said:

Well.... technically JLCR, as well as some of your examples, aren't acronyms either. They're initialisms.

An Acronym is a shortening of multiple words (not always the first letter) into one "word" that is pronounced as a word and not letters. Examples are NASA, RAM, and LASER.

An Initialism is taking the first letter of each word and pronouncing the letters, such as FBI, USA, DVD, and ATM.

An Abbreviation is a single word that is reduced to make it fewer letters, such as Dr. or St.

I suppose NAR could either be pronounced as an initialism, "En Aye Are", or as an acronym, "Naar", and people here would know what you meant. I'm not sure if LDRS is ever pronounced as "Elders" or not.

Edit: Kallahan11 beat me to it by a few minutes.

Click to expand...

Laser is a really interesting acronym, in that while it started as an acronym (LASER) it has since been adopted by most dictionaries as a word (laser) and is therefore no longer considered an acronym.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/laser

Don't ever work in aerospace, then! Our acronym list is close to 400 pages. Uggh!

Problem in Canada:

"Hey, do you know CPR?!!"
"No, but I have a friend who works at CN.."

(Canadian Pacific Railway)

You old guys and your complaining about slang.....

This whole thread is a TL;DR

tHoagland said:

Laser is a really interesting acronym, in that while it started as an acronym (LASER) it has since been adopted by most dictionaries as a word (laser) and is therefore no longer considered an acronym.

Click to expand...

It even features in another acronym, LaWS.

In theory you could use TNT to send TNT to TNT. (Courier, explosive, TV company.) And if you went into town to take a few shots with a SLR, exactly how much trouble you'd be in would depend on whether you were carrying a Single Lens Reflex or a Self-Loading Rifle.

Railways? Canada? Abbreviations/acronyms?
Can only mean one thing:



s6

stealth6 said:

Railways? Canada? Abbreviations/acronyms?
Can only mean one thing:



s6

Click to expand...

Country songs about city things... weird.

and why is 'abbreviation' such a long word?!

Saw this today and it reminded me of this thread-

cool song. They have nothing on the military.

new2hpr said:

Don't ever work in aerospace, then! Our acronym list is close to 400 pages. Uggh!

Click to expand...

And that is dangerous, IMO.

I worked for a few years as a Mechanical Engineer / QA Manager for a cryogenics company. We did work for Ball Aerospace. The meetings I went to in Boulder Colorado... it was like they were speaking pig latin.

There was a time when accuracy was the primary goal. Now speed is.

Is it really so difficult to simply say (or spell out) the words, verses using abbreviations / acronyms? For folks communicating over the air, such as pilots and air traffic controllers, I get it. But folks in meetings or written correspondences, it's dangerous.

It appears logic and proportion has fallen sloppy dead.

https://www.boeing.com/defense/autonomous-systems/hale/index.page

Automotive is the absolute worst for this. I did an internship stint at Toyota and I swear they went out of their way to make everything an acronym. Even the all the signs in the plant were acronyms.

“Heh, and you go ask the SME over in BS what the situation is in PITA with GTFO?” .. WTF?

jnobels said:

Automotive is the absolute worst for this. I did an internship stint at Toyota and I swear they went out of their way to make everything an acronym. Even the all the signs in the plant were acronyms.

“Heh, and you go ask the SME over in BS what the situation is in PITA with GTFO?” .. WTF?

Click to expand...

Never will forget the day I asked what BSIL meant on a sheet a VW. They stuck my ass “Over there” turns out BSIL meant Body Side Inner Left. And there I was with a bunch of robots writing down fault codes into excel. Lol...

Then, there is the UNDISPUTED KING of Acronyms . . . NASA !

https://www.acronymslist.com/cat/nasa-acronyms.html

Dave F.

tHoagland said:

Laser is a really interesting acronym, in that while it started as an acronym (LASER) it has since been adopted by most dictionaries as a word (laser) and is therefore no longer considered an acronym.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/laser

Click to expand...

SCUBA is similarly being adopted and is generally no longer capitalized for that reason.

Ez2cDave said:

Then, there is the UNDISPUTED KING of Acronyms . . . NASA !

Click to expand...

I use dot give a "let's talk rocket science" talk to elementary school kids ant a science day event. My last question to the group was "What does my shirt stand for?" (I wore my NASA shirt) rarely would a kid get it, let alone even a teacher.

I had one kid, one year blurt out: "North America Special Attack!!" that made my day!

cwbullet said:

...For example, JLCR...

Click to expand...

Google is not much help with that one either: https://www.google.com/search?q=JLCR

And how hard it is to put an actual web link to what one is referring to?

JLCR

What's the deal with repeating the last word that is already represented by the last letter?
ATM Machine is just an ATM, a PIN Number is just a PIN.

I am going to put a JLCR Release in my next rocket!

Ez2cDave said:

Then, there is the UNDISPUTED KING of Acronyms . . . NASA !

https://www.acronymslist.com/cat/nasa-acronyms.html

Dave F.

Click to expand...

*muffled sound of DoD laughing secretly*