Toe in the Water

Acronyms

Acronyms

I have always thought that the reason for creating acronyms was to shorten long names and so speed up the process of talking about them. Obviously, this only made sense for those things that were spoken about often. Less chatworthy subjects hardly needed an acronym, being so rarely mentioned.

Lately, however, my faith in the theory has been shaken. Every day I seem to be confronted with an acronym I’ve never heard before and have no idea of its meaning. America seems obsessed with the assigning of acronyms to new diseases, committees, departments, etc. faster than I can learn them. It’s no longer a way to make life easier; it’s become yet another tool for muddying the waters of understanding.

It used to be the convention that, when introducing an acronym into a treatise, speech or discussion, one would first express the full name of the thing, then put the acronym in brackets (parentheses) immediately after it. Once that had been done, the acronym could be used in the rest of the document without explanation.

The game is very different now. The kudos goes to those who can squeeze the most acronyms into a single paragraph, especially if they are so rarely used that it is almost guaranteed that no one will understand what they mean. Since there are too many to be remembered and enquired about, they are meekly accepted and the speaker or writer can be assured that whatever is being pushed will succeed.

The whole thing becomes ridiculous and we, the acronym-challenged, should fight back by inventing our own stupidly long and pointless acronyms. Join the revolution now and become unintelligible tomorrow!

CLOTHEARS

(Council for Long Overstatements of Tedious Homilies on Exhausting and Awkward Revolutionary Schemes)


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