What acronyms are you annoyed to see take on other meanings?
I'm running into this more and more with BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and Bungo Stray Dogs.
I was wondering if anyone else has run into anything similar?
CP does not mean:
If you're on a Unix terminal it means "copy," anywhere else it means what Josh Duggar is into.
Cerebral Policy? We could use some of that
I used cp to refer to code pointer at work. Got very weird looks...
cheese pizza
Where I am it universally refers to a railroad company, Canadian Pacific.
And in the corporate Windows world, it's the Company Portal (essentially the inter-company App Store). I always have to type it out because I don't like telling people to go to the CP.
Wireless Application Protocol. I can no longer say on my CV that I 'worked on WAP in the early 2000s'.
I'm working with data, where we have a concept called "write, audit, publish" (also abbreviated WAP). I'm laughing on the inside everyone I hear anyone talking about it.
Apparently BBC no longer means Big Black Chicken
I love how someone uploaded a video titled "Virgin asshole destroyed by BBC" to pornhub, and it was a video of Ben Shapiro losing his shit after badly failing at debating one of the BBC hosts.
Duh, it’s British Broadcasting Chicken.
Huh, I though it was British Black Chicken!
Those of a vintage beyond even my own will know that it stands for "Broken Biscuit Company", which I believe originated on BBC radio with The Goon Show. Now that's not an acronym, but it is another word that's picked up an unfortunate extra meaning in recent years.
A lot of british women I knew just loved BBC.
This! It's so frustrating trying to fill my hen house
Not annoyed but amused. I suffer from IBS. And in my work there are Internal Business Systems. So I suffer from IBS twice.
SRS/GRS is absolutely everywhere as an acronym. It stands for Sex/Gender Reassignment Surgery
HRT too (Hormone Replacement Therapy)
Therapy be wild taking CBT for cognitive behavioral therapy when it's been cock and ball torture for so, so long.
"Therapist said I needed CBT. I just walked out. That dude's fucking crazy if he thinks Imma smash my nuts."
My shop we sell cheese and bacon traveller pies, abbreviated to CBT...
BLM
Especially since the Bureau of Land Management is regularly talked about in my field.
I have no issue with the civil rights movement tho
Due to anti-DEI policies the agency is now called All Land Management
BARREN LANDS MATTER !
Not annoyed, but i enjoy annoying red hats by taking about how much I appreciate BLM. As soon as they start spouting off I start talking about how we camped on Bureau of Land Management land out west and it was great.
Alternatively, how Brennan Lee Mulligan is a great GM
Also Game Master > General Motors
D2 is either a type of steel or a great game in 8th grade.
LFG used to mean Look For Group in a lot of games. Now it's let's fucking go.
LucasFilm Games
So many people think Mac is an acronym for whatever reason, as in "Do you use MAC or PC?".
I don't know why they think this. It was never formatted that way in any of Apple's marketing materials.
It really annoys me. In my head when I read it I hear "MAC" pronounced in the voice of Gilbert Godfrey.
I'm guessing they're confusing it with MAC addresses? They probably saw the term somewhere and wrongly assumed it had something to do with Apple Macs.
I remember being annoyed when PS2 suddenly was a gaming console and not a line of personal computers from IBM.
Yes, I know it's PS2 vs. PS/2 when written out, but no one ever says PS-slash-2 when speaking.
i thought you were talking about the old mouse and keyboard connectors
OK, I'll bite. Pedant time.
"BSD" isn't an acronym. It's an initialism.
Acronyms are pronounced as a words rather than reading the letters, and, well, you'd be beatboxing if you pronounced BSD as a word.
Hey, that's my job
It’s not pronounced buzzed? I’ve been saying Freebuzzed wrong all this time???
Nobody dared telling you.
If you ever have doubts how other stuff is pronounced, just axman.
Isn't an initialism a subcategory of acronym by definition?
Other way around. Acronyms are a subcategory of initialisms, specifically the ones that can be read as if they're words.
Another one that came to mind is TF2. I like Titanfall 2 more than Team Fortress 2 but I associate the acronym with Team Fortress 2.
You just reminded me the confusion I had trying to figure out if people are talking about Battlefield 2 or Battlefront 2 years ago
Ah man another one of these is Monster Hunter World (MHW) and now the new game Monster Hunter Wilds (MHW). 🤦
Ever play D2?
Two sided dice, for binary decisions in DnD? Sure, I’ve flipped a coin
As a dude who loves Transport Fever 2, you better believe I get this wrong a lot.
Isis used to be the fake spy agency Archer worked for. Damn those middle-eastern radicals stealing the name!
Before that, Isis was an Egyptian goddess and a hot superhero with crossovers to Shazam
Right? Archer's Isis didn't replace those, just made them more Accessable
SWIFT is not a programming language it's a trading protocol that runs the global financial markets which I'm working very hard to forget but still it deserves respect.
But the name of the language isn’t an acronym it’s just the word swift.
Doesn't change the fact that people think it's the same thing lol
AC -- alternating current, ass crust
DTF -- downtime failure, discreet time fourier, down to funkyland
SMB -- server message block, some mammamia bros
IANAL -- i am not a lawyer, sure you do
FTP: free to play, file transfer protocol
SRS: Serious, sex reassignment surgery, social responsiveness scale, etc
LOL: laugh out loud, lots of love, loot or lie
LOL: laugh out loud, lots of love, loot or lie
League of Legends
first time I experienced LOL was way back, Early 1990s. When AOL was still in 1.x for the Apple. My buddy and I broke into his brothers work computer and were playing around online in the chat rooms. They told us it was Loser On Line and it was a long time before I understood that wasnt what it was.... those jerks
I had a kinder experience and was told LOL was Leg of Lamb. That just left me confused.
AOL: Absent, on leave
All the time. Like at some point SC stopped meaning StarCraft and started meaning Splinter Cell. And don't let me get started about the famous roleplaying game PoE. Yes, or course I mean Pillars of Eternity and not Path of Exile.
bruh it's South Carolina
Sorry, can't read PoE as anything besides Permit Office Enforcement
PoE is power over ethernet
Lol, i can't think of PoE as anything but Power over Ethernet.
SC is soundcloud to me
PoE = Portal of Evil which was a directory of weird-ass websites.
The Linux Kernel has a specific one, whereby DRM doesn't mean Digital Rights Protection, only thing I could think of.
That one's especially egregious because the Direct Rendering Manager handles displaying things to the screen, where you might have Digital Rights Management involvement in the form of HDCP support, etc.
yeah, I still get confused with that one
LoRa - to me it's Long Range Radio and has been for a decade. It has some fucking AI slop meaning that recently came up, now.
DP is Diet Pepsi
Dr. Pepper
Ummm...no it isn't. Sorry
It's dog park.
It's weird seeing news articles about the SEC that have nothing to do with college football.
You mean size exclusion chromatography, surely.
A group of separatist rebels in the Philippines formed the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
MILF, for short.
In Berlin there's a car hire company called "Miles" (very handy, you can book and pick up a car in minutes) and they have a bunch of vans with a "damaged" e. So now it says Milfs. Hoho.
CBT
Cock and Ball Torture and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
for me cbt means changed block tracking. I used to work on developing vm backup software
Which of those is new and annoys you?
PDF file must be one of the Most brainrot offenders
CNC :(
BotW will always mean Best of the Worst to me. Zelda fans should just get over it and spell it out every time. And I like that game.
It's not annoying, only quite funny, but every time I see CSM (Chainsaw Man) I can only think of Coño'e su Madre / Cocha'e su Madre (Motherfucker in Latinamerica).
never thought of the anime as bsd. sorta funny. I have to admit magic the gathering became so popular all of a sudden in the news.
I'm aging myself here, but WoW used to stand for "Winds of War", an expansion for Heroes of Might and Magic IV. Then, World of Warcraft was released...
[off topic]
You can dance to it, and they have an important message!
Ooh I've got one! I wanna do a poll within this thread, so please respond with a spoiler tag so you don't influence anyone's answers.
But what does IMHO mean to you?
Comment below and then come back and read this:
In my honest opinion of course
SNAFU, how it went from chaotic situation to make a blunder?
Also, why are Americans so obsessed with acronyms?
Also, why are Americans so obsessed with acronyms?
My guess would be WW2 and the US Army. The military likes to keep messages concise, so they love to use acronyms. For many service men, the Army was their first experience outside of their small towns. When the soldiers entered the civilian world they brought their training with them. AWOL [Absent With Out Leave] is still a common expression here. SNAFU [Situation Normal, All Fouled UP] and FUBAR [Fouled Up Beyond All Repair] went from being gags to part of the common speech.
Bonus =https://youtu.be/FTBcu34fpHc
I don't mean the military acronyms, those make the most sense of all.
I mean all the other, you just need to see the reat of the comments, video games, names of celebrities and politicians, others are used as euphemisms. Now you can even read news articles were only use the acronym of whatever without mentioning a single time what that acronym stands for.
POV is just not point of view anymore. In modern social media it mostly shows something where there could be a POV, but now you see it in 3rd person because people don't care about what POV means.
MK, Mortal Kombat, not Mario Kart.
CH, Chapulín Colorado, not Christina Herrera.
SNK, Shin Nihon Kikaku, not Shingeki no Kyojin.
SNK - Saturday Night Korea!
I use dbt at work, meaning both data build tool, as well as dialectic behavioural theory
Acromyms form words. You mean abbreviations.
Is that correct? I think by definition an initialism can be considered a form of acronym. The way I worded the question includes those subsets of acronyms
DNF: Disjunctive normal form, Dandified YUM
It's Did Not Finish in racing
I put DNF stickers on items around the house, to remind myself that not everything exists for sexual gratification.
🤣
MTG it's a trading card game and not some dumb ass politician.
I try to pronounce it "Empty G" with a slight emphasis on the "p".
I also see 'meeting' abbreviated as MTG. Which, is now what I call it when I send texts to my friends to play Magic. "Hey, got time for a MTG MTG?"
Gotta run with the lowercase "t" to have a little distinction