'The 10 worst acronyms if you're a pedant (grrr)' blog discussion

molerat

Torry_Quine wrote: »

The one that annoys me is SNP party. :mad:

Annoys me too, with or without the party, but that is for another discussion

John_Pierpoint

anniecave wrote: »

PAT testing ...

The thing I hate is people who introduce acronyms into a discussion without defining initially what they mean.

Let me see "P A T" = Procedure for Authorising Taxation - it certainly tends to generate Compulsory Unmitigated Expense on behalf of the nanny state.

We have to add a spurious explanation onto the end of an acronym because we DON'T understand of that what we are trying to explain or as the late Mr Churchill would have said "what we are talking about".

Or perhaps it is an example of B*llsh*t Baffles Brains [BBB]

Over to you...................... [I'm off to pat Pat's dog]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_appliance_testing

Premier_2

ABS system / Antiblockiersystem system.

MothballsWallet

MX5huggy wrote: »

SAM missile, Surface to Air Missile missile, probably helps to have 2 missiles, doubles your chance of success.

Especially if the missile operator is American, they might have a chance of hitting the target and not just the hospital nearby

So, found some more acronym-using tautologies, have we Martin?

Not quite the same, but how about the National Institute for Healthcare & Clinical Excellence being abbreviated to NICE - where's the "H" for "Healthcare"?

esuhl

Anyone remember several years ago when the mainstream media would refer to a web-based business as a "dot.com"? Surely that would be pronounced "dot dot com"...?

John_Gray

If Martin had been a true pedant, rather than merely a grrrh pedant he would have known that acronyms are, in fact, different from initialisms.

Acronym: "an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word (e.g. ASCII, NASA). Compare with initialism."

Initialism: "an abbreviation consisting of initial letters pronounced separately (e.g. BBC). Compare with acronym."

So of his so-called acronyms, ATM, LCD, RSVP, and GPS are actually initialisms, with EHIC being arguable.

5½ / 10, could try harder...

Pedans pedantis

hartcjhart

T.L.A. cos in itself it is a T.L.A.

esuhl

A slight variant on the "collapsible initialism" is the "recursive initialism". Things like this:

VISA = VISA International Service Association
GNU = GNU's Not Linux
WINE = WINE Is Not An Emulator

John_Gray

John_Pierpoint wrote: »

The thing I hate is people who introduce acronyms into a discussion without defining initially what they mean.

I'm wondering whether this was an accidental or a deliberately clever pun?!

There are many more recursive initialisms/acronyms in this Wikipedia article, most apparently coined in a sense of desperation...

More problematical is Acronym/Initialism Re-use (AIR), where the same set of initials can have multiple meanings.
RAS on IBM mainframes always meant Reliability, Availability and Serviceability - or Remote Access (sub-)System. The chances of it meaning Roundabout Appreciation Society are vanishingly small!

wozearly

MothballsWallet wrote: »

Not quite the same, but how about the National Institute for Healthcare & Clinical Excellence being abbreviated to NICE - where's the "H" for "Healthcare"?

Ah, but NICE makes a more readily pronouncible acronym...and puts a positive sound to an organisation who has to make difficult decisions on which treatments to fund.

If they were aiming for acronym perfection, they could have switched "healthcare" and "clinical" and gone for NICHE.

Although if NICHE guidelines were used to determine whether a drug is available or not, you'd forgive indignant patients for demanding "So? What do the mainstream guidelines say?"