http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/news-style-guide/art...
> However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).
If you look in google news, only the British media uses Aids and Opec. The rest of the world uses capitalised. I'm from the UK, and this is definitely not normal in the UK. It just seems to be some strange (and incorrect IMO) style that the British media has adopted. Their own exceptions (NICE, PC, SAD, UKIP) show the ridiculousness of their policy.
I guess the question is, what is the value of styling "Aids" such? My assumption is that they would say that such acronyms have become words in English, people understand "Aids" or "Nato" as a "thing" and don't even think of it as an acronym (just like "scuba diving" or "laser" or "radar").
If it has basically become a word, it just slows reading down to write it in all caps.
...but I can see it's a debatable issue. This is probably one of those things where some words will become like "laser" and "radar," and some won't. BBC is trying to be on the forefront in guessing which words will be.
The British convention has a clearer mapping between written and spoken language, but leads to ambiguity in the case where there is a name collision between an acronym and the case where there is a collision between an acronym and a common noun and the word occurs in sentence-initial position (or in title case), the latter is also a problem throughout English print usage with proper nouns (instead of acronyms), and the ambiguities that arise in print this way are very nearly a subset of the ambiguities that arise in speech with the same terms. [0]
The non-British usage has worse correspondence between written and spoken language, and leads to ambiguity where there is a collision between an acronym and an initialism, though this is probably rarer. While this may be a less-common situation than the ambiguities produced in the British usage, it is a ambiguity less-closely tied to the inherent ambiguity in speech.
Neither is "incorrect", they are simply different conventions, with different features, and either case the ambiguities produced are usually only theoretical and in practice readily resolved through context.
[0] "Subset" because the speech ambiguities occur indepedently of the conditions that affect casing (initial position in sentence, or title case); "Very nearly" because sometimes terms that are spelled identically and thus would be ambiguous in print are pronounced differently and would be distinct in speech.
If you wouldn't pronounce it, it's not an acronym
In everyday conversation, yeah, they're acronyms.
Unfortunately, "acronym" is widely enough used in the broader sense that includes initialisms that this broader and less-useful definition is a well-documented definition (remember that dictionaries are descriptive of language use, not prescriptive), though its certainly better and facilitates more clear communication to consistently distinguish between "acronyms" in the strict sense (those pronounced as words) and "initialisms" and other abbreviations, rather than using "acronyms" in a broad sense, but because of the conflicting definitions in use one must, until and unless the consistent use of the term renders the broader definition non-current and obsolete, expressly indicate that "acronym" is being used in that narrow sense when so doing, otherwise confusion is likely to ensue.