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Comment by LittlePeter | Hacker News Reader

I was waiting for the DDT acronym to be explained, but no. IMHO no matter how obvious an acronym may be, it should be explained, something like "DDT (D... D... T...) is highly dangerous".

Apparently: "Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT, is a colorless, tasteless, and almost odorless crystalline chemical compound, an organochlorine."

edit: added explanation

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It’s in paragraph 12, about 1/7 of the way in, after the scene setting opening bit about the barrels.

> The world today wrestles with microplastics, bisphenol A (BPA), per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and other toxics so unnatural they don’t seem to ever go away. But DDT — the all-but-indestructible compound dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which first stunned and jolted the public into environmental action — persists as an unsolved and largely forgotten problem.

To be honest, DDT is like "IBM". It might mean "International Business Machines", but many people wouldn't immediately recognize it unless the acronym is used (while the opposite is true: if you know what the acronym stands for, you usually know the acronym as well).

And I'm sure Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane wouldn't add much for most people that read a newspaper :)

Even from the context, it was not clear to me what DDT was. I suspected it was some chemical. I would have appreciated a sentence or two explaining why it is bad and what it does.

What IBM is would typically be clear from the context: "IBM reported record loss in 2nd quarter of 2020".

Maybe this is a generational thing because I did not think that DDT would need any explanation. It at least used to be a household name which everyone recognized.

A sentence like this one in paragraph 7?

> From 1947 to 1982, the nation’s largest manufacturer of DDT — a pesticide so powerful that it poisoned birds and fish — was based in Los Angeles.

You're right. My expectations we wrong. I expected short concise news article, but this seems to be a long-form article. My bad.

Some decades ago, DDT was practically its brand name in the US, because of how well it worked on mosquitos. People used it in their backyards.

Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane.

DDT.

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