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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

Is NASA no longer an acronym or something?

UK style, and this article is from the Guardian, is to capitalize only the first letter of acronyms that are pronounced like words, "Nasa" and "Nato" being frequent examples. When each letter is pronounced (AKA an initialism), they capitalize each letter, such as for the WHO: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52294623

Aah, interesting. Thank you for clarifying!

Very interesting, thanks for this.

I find this practice very dumb. A huge amount of acronyms now have to be written like regular words.

Eh, Americans do it too, just less consistently. When's the last time you saw LASER?

I'd say things like laser are no longer the acronym they once were. How many people actually realize that laser is/was an acronym in the first place? The word itself has 'genericized' to the point that it's just a word to most people now.

I could as well suggest the same about Nasa :) For all HNers that the distinction will be incredibly obvious, to Joe Schmo from Idaho, perhaps less so.

I would imagine that most people don't know what NASA stands for. At this point it's just a word.

Americans do not do this, when was the last time you saw Potus?

On the flip side, it disambiguates the pronunciation. BBC has each letter spoken individually, NASA does not.

"BBC" is not an acronym though, it's an initialism.

That's the point I was making, yes.

And then you have brands like POLITICO who go and ruin it for everyone. I'm very glad we don't tolerate those case shenanigans.

What really annoys me about the UK MSM is they'll write "COBRA", or even worse, "Cobra" for the COBR meetings.

COBRA is a nickname (not an acronym) for the Civil Contingencies Committee based on the meetings being in COBR (an initialism/acronym).

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/cobr-co...

Everyday is a school day.

Thanks

It is an acronym, but it is rendered according to the house style of any given publication. The Guardian's style guide [1] says:

Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters (an initialism): BBC, CEO, US, VAT, etc; if it is an acronym (pronounced as a word) spell out with initial capital, eg Nasa, Nato, Unicef, unless it can be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as awol, laser and, more recently, asbo, pin number and sim card. Note that pdf and plc are lowercase.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a#...

Do people in the UK spell out VAT or say Vat? I've heard it said both ways, but I'm on the other side of the pond where we use NASA not Nasa.

Maybe we should default to "What's it look like on the logo?" The NASA logo for one would look pretty dumb as Nasa.

We do it both ways in speech, so say either V-A-T or vat, but it seems always to be VAT in text, according to the style guides of every publication for which I've worked, or have read for (weird) interest.

So, isn't that breaking their own style guide? That was kind of my point.

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