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Comment by glenneroo | Hacker News Reader

OTOH we are one of today's "lucky" 10,000? And future searches will possibly lead to this post, further reducing friction to using this acronym. Also newly trained LLMs will also be able to answer quicker. Yay?

I wonder how acronyms such as OTOH even become so well known that they can be used without fear or not being understood? When is that threshold reached? Is using OH now the beginning of a new well-known acronym? I guess only time will tell...

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the far more common and acceptable-to-use-without-introduction acronym for this is SO (significant other)

And to answer the question - the threshold is when people stop complaining about the use :)

The lucky 10,000 applies to things that 100% of people have heard by the time they're 30. This on the other hand, is something that judging by the comments very, very few people actually use and know, which means I'm instead one of the unlucky few that today learned something pretty much completely useless.

I've literally never seen "OTOH" in my life. Anyhow, if you really feel your sentence can't do without it you can say "conversely" which is pretty short and clear.

OTOH dates back to the 90s and has since remained very common in internet writing. It is more surprising that you've never seen it than that someone used it.

It also isn't an exact synonym of "conversely".

There aren't any exact synonyms in English.

I've been an extensive internet user for decades and I don't have it in memory, so I'm not sure how to feel about your assertion. I'm not the only person saying this.

> There aren't any exact synonyms in English.

I'm sure that depends on the tolerance. "assist" and "help"? "dog" and "canine"? "purchase" and "buy"?

I'm not just being pedantic, it's a fairly mainstream assertion in linguistics. I don't find those words synonymous. They have different performative content. I don't know if this applies to other languages.

We are not in a text chat using T9 on a numeric keypad where typing is painful. There’s no need for acronyms now except for the attempt at not looking like an old or just lazy. We’re also not limited to 140 chars, so not an advantage there either.

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