Hacker News Reader

Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

There is not much that is more annoying than an author assuming the reader knows the acronyms that they want to use.

This particular case isn't as bad as others, but especially when getting into any sort of technical conversation it's wildly frustrating to see multiple acronyms used with no indication of what they stand for. Then you go to look it up and there's like 29 results that fit the acronym, half of them being plausible.

I was always taught to use the full word/name/whatever the first time it occurs in writing and immediately provide the acronym in brackets (I've also seen vice-versa, which is fine), then feel free to acronym-soup the rest of the text. I sorely miss when that was the rule, now that it seems like it is the exception.

View on HN

I swear the acronym BOGO appeared ex nihilo three years ago. I’d literally never seen it before then and was very confused about what it meant, and still am convinced it’s an acronym that a marketing firm invented to sound hip. (buy one get one for anyone out of the loop)

BOPIS went from the back-office (is that even a word anymore?) to consumer marketing during the pandemic, too..

What's BOPIS?

Buy Online, Pick up In Store.

>I swear the acronym BOGO appeared ex nihilo three years ago.

No, that just happened a moment ago. :)

I am familiar with the concept; just not familiar with it as an acronym.

Here in Tampa, so close to the birthplace of Publix Supermarkets, we are born knowing to seek out BOGOs.

BOGO as a shopping term has been around as long as I can remember.

Merriam-Webster is reporting that the first attested usage of BOGO was from 1983, but I had never encountered the term until last night when my wife used it in conversation! It confused me so much she had to finally say "buy one..."

Then I got to explain bogo as a prefix in computing and chess before picking nits like "shouldn't it be BOGOF" (typical HN commentor that I am)?

BOGOF was definitely enough of an established term here for ads that were making fun of the term in a meta sense while sharing their offers to have existed in the 90s.

I've never seen it as just BOGO though.

First time I see it. Had it been used in a HN comment, I would have ranted about people inventing acronyms on the spot and expecting everybody to know them. I live in England and I've never seen it before.

English is the lingua franca of the Internet, but this example shows that some acronyms are not as global as people might think. I guess BOGO (buy one get one) might be commonplace if you shop in an American store, but anybody else that doesn't live there might not have had exposure to it before, and get quite annoyed. Same with stuff like GOP (Grand Old Party) or even DUI (Driving Under the Influence). Americans on the Internet just love to drop their three-letter acronyms on an international forum.

Acronyms are context and location sensitive. One should refrain to use them on the Internet unless you can expect anyone who's reading you to know then (i.e. FBI, WHO, UN)

My dictionary has a definition of FOMO which is more nuanced than just spelling out an acronym, and it has a pronunciation which is not just the letters said one at a time.

So in this case I think spelling out the acronym is neither necessary (as articles typically needn’t define moderately well known words) nor sufficient (as the term’s meaning is more than just the expansion of the acronym).

Technically (by the original definition anyway) it's not an acronym unless you can pronounce it as a word. Most of what we call acronyms these days are "initialisms". Some of them are almost never used in speech anyway (I don't think I've ever heard anyone say 'FWIW', for instance - it's more 4 syllables than what it stands for!).

/ˈfəʊ.məʊ/

Guess it’s an acronym.

Yes, that was my point - technically it wouldn't be one otherwise.

This isn't even a technical or business acronym, it's a common colloquial.

It's used in mainstream television advertisements like the FOMOH ads by the NHL (fear of missing out on hockey).

FOMO is probably as well-known as other acronyms that aren't explained every time they come up: IRS, LGBT, DMV, MLB, NYC, etc.

And, really, if you don't know it, you just do this:

CTRL+T define:FOMO ENTER

I mean, we're already in a web browser...

But here we go, now we're deep in an HN thread about something so incredibly trivial – it really is true that our day jobs are bullshit if we've got this much time to kill on this kind of discussion. (I'm unemployed, what's the rest of y'all's excuse?)

I said this one isn't much of an issue, didn't I? But it's related to a bigger complaint of mine, which has had non-trivial consequences in the past, so I talked about it.

But that bigger complaint didn't come up in this case, so why are we talking about it?

It's not like the article dives into terms like SE, ICP, AE, CSM, or anything like that.

"Non-trivial consequences," lol, cracks me up. Won't anyone think of all the lost productivity?

Are you the comment police or something?

I replied to someone talking about not spelling out acronyms by talking more about not spelling out acronyms.

I don't know much more on topic I could possibly be.

Sorry if I offended I guess? I'll try not to discuss things as much on this discussion board.

Actually, I'm your boss. My unemployment story was a ruse! Get back to work!

"IRS, LGBT, DMV, MLB, NYC, etc."

IRS & DMV are very US-specific (I do happen to know what they mean, but I'd venture many non-Americans wouldn't). I have no idea what MLB means...

(looked it up - if it's referring to baseball, well then, again, somewhat US-centric. Though I am surprised I've never heard it called that, vs, say, NBA, which long ago gained international recognition.)

> (I'm unemployed, what's the rest of y'all's excuse?)

I'm in a meeting right now :-)

Ah, so we share a similar level of productivity!

> There is not much that is more annoying than an author assuming the reader knows the acronyms that they want to use

Sometimes you're not the intended audience and that's okay too. Constantly explaining acronyms that everyone in the audience uses daily gets frustrating too.

Imagine if every article written for senior software engineers in VC-backed companies had to re-explain what PR, CI, VC and AWS stand for. Or if every article for American audiences re-explained LA, NYC, and EST.

Jargon is useful.

When I write, I typically DO spell these things out.

> We accepted a pull request ("PR") for our continuous integration ("CI") server. As a result, CI will now automatically trigger a canary release instead of the old blue-green deployment process, except on AWS where canary releases are not supported.

Note that there's no real interruption to the flow of the writing, as I only spell it out the first time it is mentioned. Nor do I stop to explain what "pull-request" means -- the full name (unlike the acronym) is enough to perform a search on the topic and read about it if needed. And I don't do this universally: everyone I know uses "AWS" instead of "Amazon Web Services" and even pronounces it that way in conversation, so I don't bother explaining that one.

You also don’t bother explaining what canary releases are. Which is weird. Who is your intended audience with that example? Is this some imaginary audience who knows and cares about canary releases and blue-green deployment but somehow missed out on PRs and CI?

You can at least easily Google "canary release" I suppose, in a way that's going to give a clear answer vs googling "PR" or "CI" (which will likely tell you PR means public relations and CI is the symbol for a "curie"/unit of radiation).

but it would be impossible to google FOMO...

Not sure what your point is, I'm defending not spelling out things that are easy to google. FOMO and "canary release" both are, while CI/PR, not so much. In principle if you were writing something for an audience that may or may not have heard of continuous integration or pull requests, at least spelling them out makes it easier for them to look up their meanings. I don't actually think it's a big deal either way, though it's surprising how often people use abbreviations and just (incorrectly) assume others know what they mean. If you're writing on any sort of interactive platform, being around to explain them if asked is probably sufficient though.

> everyone I know uses "AWS" instead of "Amazon Web Services" and even pronounces it that way in conversation, so I don't bother explaining that one

Maybe that’s how this author’s bubble feels about FOMO.

I for one don’t think I’ve ever heard the full version of “FOMO” in conversation. Similarly to how everyone I know says “pee-arr” and may not even remember it’s short for something.

I just wanted you to know: You are completely correct and everybody arguing with you is wrong.

>Constantly explaining acronyms

Writing out an acronym one time in your paper/article/blog is not "constantly".

>Sometimes you're not the intended audience

Often times I run into this issue when I am the intended audience, but may not be familiar with the trendiest acronym to describe something. Or I'm familiar with 2-3 uses of the same acronym and am not sure which one is applicable.

>Writing out an acronym one time in your paper/article/blog is not "constantly".

Exactly, and neither is it explaining.

I don't get what the big deal is, "fear of missing out (FOMO)" is just four words extra, once, and you don't need to write an essay on the etymology of the term or something. It just ensures we're all on the same page and when it's not clear to someone they can google it. Do people not know how many overlapping abbreviations there are? It's almost like the acronyms are shortening the words somehow to a smaller representation that is not necessarily unique.

> Writing out an acronym one time in your paper/article/blog is not "constantly".

I think you mean "your paper/article/weblog (blog)"

You really got me there!

But clipping isn't the same as acronyms, mainly because a clipped word is (generally) easily searchable whereas acronyms are shared across several domains and will sometimes overlap inside a single domain, which is the source of the frustration for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com