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What is your least favourite acronym? (lemmy.nz)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I care, but mostly because it's fun. Just like apparently there's no such thing as a fish, and that fruits are vegetables...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I thought vegetables weren’t a botanical classification?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Today I learned that laser is an acronym. "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Radar and sonar are both acronyms as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Initialisms are a type of acronym. All initialisms are acronyms but not all acronyms are initialisms.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Other way around.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Sometimes, initialism or alphabetism is used to refer to acronyms formed from the string of initials which are usually pronounced as individual letters

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hmm, okay, it's apparently debated. However, the only way I've learned it is that initialisms are words formed from initial letters of included words, and acronyms are initialisms pronounced as words. It seems like it varies by country as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I think it makes logical sense that acronyms are initialisms, since initialism just implies that it's formed from the initials, thus all abbreviations formed from the initials of the words are initialisms, while a subset of those can be pronounced as a word and thus can be called acronyms. Personally I think it's very important that things are named such that one can logically deduce their origin and meaning.