What is your least favourite acronym?
What is your least favourite acronym?
Mine is OOO for Out Of Office. I always misread it in my head like a ghost and it takes me a few seconds to process. It also doesn't translate to speech—you have to say the whole thing.
Interested to see if others have similar acronyms they beef with.
As a kid, I was in the room at one point while my mom was watching some TV show, maybe law and order or something similar. I heard somebody letting somebody else know (verbally) the details of some victim and described the cause of injury or death or whatever as "GSW". I asked my mom what GSW meant. She said "gun shot wound". I said that that couldn't possibly be right, and she was curious why. I said because "gun shot wound" is 3 syllables and "GSW" is 5; it's literally quicker to say the full thing.
So yeah, GSW is fucking stupid when said aloud, and even me as a dumbass child knew that.
Just to be “that guy” I wanted to say that an acronym is technically an initialism that you pronounce as a word, like SCUBA, LASER, or NASA. If it’s just letters that stand for something, it’s called an initialism. No one cares (not even me), but I had to say it :P
Most acronyms that have a W in them are pointless to say aloud in English. It’s almost always shorter to just say the words. Like WTF, for example. Those are my least favorite
Oh and YMMV. I used to work with car data and we would use YMMB to mean “year/make/model/body” and so I always start reading YMMV wrong and that bugs me
Norway has a weird obsession with making translated acronyms for well established terms. Lately, after many years of use of "AI", the Language Council decided that the term should be changed to "KI", as that is the "correct" Norwegian acronym. Not only does it feel wrong to say, but it invades another local acronym for me.
To top it of, that council decided to make "KI-generated" the "word of the year", which seems like a pat on their own shoulder to brilliantly making the acronym.
I hate it.
ETA, but not the estimated time of arrival that everyone knows.
The ETA that Tumblr and XX chromosomes made popular that actually means Edited to add...
Rather than just Edit: or E:.
But it means I added something!... Right... That's literally the definition of edit... Blood is thicker than the water of the womb too right? Lmfao.
CAPTCHA is pretty bad, apparently it’s Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
Source: http://www.captcha.net/
Edit: I also dislike www, it’s annoying to say 👎
After 20 years in EMS, (see how it starts immediately - Emergency Medical Services), The whole bloody damned field is nothing but acronyms for as far as the eye can see.
From BPM - Beats per minute, to ABC - Airway, Breathing, circulation, (which today is more like ACB - Airway, Circulation, Breathing) to OPQRST - Onset, provoke/pallation, Quality, Region/Radiation, Severity, Time to A-Fib - Atrial Fibrillation to SOB - Shortness of Breath.
I hate them all........
obscure corporate jargon like KPIs (key performance indicators), KRIs (key risk indicators) which, after having thrown them at me during an interview for a college intern position, made the interviewer wonder why i got so flustered. i would hesitate to throw any acronyms around in any interview, let alone for a college student.
by the way, i got the internship. the acronyms weren't even used in my position.
TBF
To Be Fucked.
I have a weird thing where I'll know an acronym that's close to another one, confuse the two, and come up with a new acronym that doesn't exist or make sense, but it "works" and then the rest of the context is just off.
The latest victim of this is "Assigned Cis At Birth"
Now that that's out in the world, I'm sorry that someone else is going to do the same thing...
IKR required a search to figure out. Autocorrect takes care of these typical phrases. Imo the only one I like to use is imo for some reason.
Like all of them, I never remember what they mean and there are some people at work who love to use em. It just makes meetings take longer and emails become less legible.
My least favourite acronym:
- AUTMA: Americans use too many acronyms
One that always confuses me is MSM. For over 40 years it has been used to mean "Men who have sex with men", but recently conservatives started using it to mean "mainstream media" and its sometimes hard to tell which of their hates they are talking about. MSM is still widely used in the medical community when discussing/classifying patients and in the ongoing AIDS epidemic.
Let's see how many of these the decronym bot knows
@Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz
Nothing can beat the baseball stat TOOTBLAN
Thrown Out On The Basepaths Like A Nincompoop
World Wide Web is simpler than Double U Double U Double U.
WINE is not an emulator!
RTFM (read the friendly manual)
WYD and IKR
STFU
I remember watching a video by Ryan Higa thinking it meant "stop tickling furry unicorns", it wasn't until I learned what it actually meant years later that I got pretty damn disappointed.
VOD is a close second though. I hate how you could take something that refers to something so general (videos on demand), and over time starr using it to exclusively refer to past Twitch streams. I know that this is what Twitch calls them, and it's technically not wrong to call them that, but it still doesn't make sense when that's all that VOD means nowadays. I miss the days of being jealous at the Americans for having cable.
Might be unpopular, but as a non-English native I hate that Americans need to abbreviate everything into acronyms. POSTUS, SCOTUS, AWOL, ASAP. If it's not catchy as an abbreviation it needs a new name. I don't mind it so much in small settings, but when you read anything about America and all the comments are full of acronyms it's like a puzzle I never asked for.
I hate the name vi. It literally means "we" in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. But I know that vi is not an acronym so it doesn't really count.
Mine are "lol" and "lmao". I get what they originally meant, and I get why most people use them nowadays. It's just that they often signal "I have nothing to contribute, but still expect people to read my crap".
As a second (third?) place, "WYSIWYG". If you're going to coin such verbose acronym, might as well sub it with an actual word, like, dunno, "transparent".
EDIT - "lol" = "lots of laughs", "lmao" = "laughing my arse off", "WYSIWYG" = "what you see is what you get".
EDIT2: as another poster correctly pointed out, "lol" also originally meant "laughing out loud". Perhaps even more than "lots of laughs".
Pfa
Permanently Deleted