Acronyms

My pet peeve is folks who refer to initialisms (CIA, FBI, NGS, GPS, etc.) as acronyms (NOAA, LASER, PETA, ?ÿetc.)

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@loyal

I don't see the distinction as being important enough to argue about, and not every authority makes the distinction.  To some extent it depends on how hard you want to work at pronouncing it.  Here's one take on the subject.

https://www.dailywritingtips.com/acronym-vs-initialism/

My favorite three letter acronym is "TLA".

This makes me think of personalized license plates on vehicles. ?ÿMany are multi-word acronyms. ?ÿOthers are simply initials. A simple example of that is JFKLPK. ?ÿThat is on a vehicle owned by the King's, Jacob Franklin and Lois Priscilla.

Wow, a record. Power users topic no doubt. First 6 poster's total 40,120 posts between them. Average poster?ÿ has 6,687 posts. No wonder this topic went over my head...lol

Posted by: @norman-oklahoma

My favorite three letter acronym is "TLA".

Reminds me of the old SF254 that had (in very small font)?ÿ the letters "DNA" above the spaces allowed for project descriptions.?ÿ It's reported to have indicated "Do Not Abbreviate"...

But hey, it's a government form.?ÿ What would you expect??ÿ 😉

Surveyors will never be as bad as the FAA regarding acronyms.

@bill93

"1985 Called by the acronym SCSD (Schools Construction System Development)."

They made a mistake, SCSD is the initialism for Seminole County Sherrifs Department. ???? 

My wife was in private practice as a Nurse Practitioner for nearly 20 years.?ÿ Her practice used one (started by the Doc) to put on the charts: TSTL.?ÿ "Too Stupid To Live".?ÿ Luckily none of the patients never asked about the tab.

Andy

In a different life I worked for a small defense inelegance agency with it's own acronym or initialism if you prefer.?ÿ The joke around the vault was that we could go out to a bar and have an in-depth conversation in a public place about work using only acronyms and no one would ever understand a word of what we were talking about.

We've got a draftsman in our office who's from Iran. Nice guy, but He's overqualified for His position and culturally awkward. He's working towards His license so He sometimes begins to act like other people are stupid. One day He was asking what a swale was and calling it a SWAH-LAY. That was good for a couple laughs. He also screws up stuff for field crews by giving us useless or bad information, so I started giving Him a random shot here and there to stir the pot. For example once I included "Dog Bomb" with some topo. He asked some office people about that resulting in more laughs. Since this thread was on acronyms, or whatever I also gave Him a FDSDP shot which happened to be a "Found disoriented sick dying possum." It must have been poisoned cause I saw it dead, not playing dead about an hour later in the sun covered in flies. He never asked me about that one.?ÿ

My son starts college this week with an Air Force ROTC scholarship.?ÿ Lots of extra paperwork with acronyms galore.?ÿ The latest included the attached:

?ÿ

Along with hair cut instructions (with diagrams), general tidiness directions, organization suggestions and other things that his mom and I have spent the last eighteen years encouraging. Mostly with mixed results.

?ÿ

Posted by: @d-bendell

We've got a draftsman in our office who's from Iran. Nice guy, but He's overqualified for His position and culturally awkward. He's working towards His license so He sometimes begins to act like other people are stupid. One day He was asking what a swale was and calling it a SWAH-LAY. That was good for a couple laughs. He also screws up stuff for field crews by giving us useless or bad information, so I started giving Him a random shot here and there to stir the pot. For example once I included "Dog Bomb" with some topo. He asked some office people about that resulting in more laughs. Since this thread was on acronyms, or whatever I also gave Him a FDSDP shot which happened to be a "Found disoriented sick dying possum." It must have been poisoned cause I saw it dead, not playing dead about an hour later in the sun covered in flies. He never asked me about that one.?ÿ

I worked with an engineer from India that didn't qualify for his PE here in the US, hence he was doomed to a CAD machine for production.?ÿ He was a really intelligent fella that had far more experience with materials than anybody I had ever met.?ÿ Definitely overqualified.?ÿ

We had a road widening project we were working on for "Tecumseh Road".?ÿ There were eventually sixty something plan sheets for the project.?ÿ Every last one of them proudly read "Tecumesh Road"...sometimes multiple times on each sheet.?ÿ He said he was pretty sure we had misspelled it, so he changed it.?ÿ In his defense he told us there was a town in India named Tekumesh.

ICYMI this thread is TLDR, LOL.

@bob-freeman

After my son entered the Air Force, the first thing he told me when he had the opportunity to contact me by letter was "I am fine, got a tattoo on my way to camp. Guess what, they frown on tattoos, so I have been doing extra duty since I've arrived.

When the family went to visit around his graduation from Bootcamp, talk was all acronyms and jargon that was constant from morning till it was over.