Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
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However, a big part of why Tech, software, computer science, etc. have a lot of acronyms is because there are a lot of new, often abstract things to name, and acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing. And I don't think anyone would really want to write out all of "hypertext transfer protocol" instead of http. And imagine if every url looked like "hypertext-transfer-protocol://world-wide-web.example.commercial/index.hypertext-text-markup-language". And if it had been given some other name, say "hyperprot" would that be any more meaningful than http?
Re: acronyms in English vs spanish.
I wonder if this is related to how human communication has a constant rate of information transfer. From what I understand, spanish is spoken faster, (more syllables per second) but has less information per syllable. One way that english is able to convey more information with less syllables is the use of acronyms and other abbreviations. And this is especially true for professional jargon that you use a lot to speak with colleagues at your job.
> You don’t see Kant writing TCI instead of “The Categorical Imperative” or Rousseau writing TSC instead of “The Social Contract”. You usually see the creation of concepts (Biopolitics by Foucault, Zeitgeist by Herder, Orientalism by Said) or the use of nominalization.
I don't think any of those terms are much better than acronyms. Maybe the name gives you a vague idea of what they refer to, but like many acronyms they are labels for complex ideas that you can't really understand just by knowing what it is called. And these terms can be, and are used for "in-group signalling" in much the same way as acronyms.
Finally, tech is not at all unique in its abundant use of acronyms. I don't know about in other languages but at least in English, Math, Physics, and astronomy also make heavy use of acronyms (ODE, PDE, QED, LCD, AGN, LASER, QCD, SI, CGS, AU, BEC, etc.) And from what I've observed medical and sales professionals also use a lot of acronyms.
The Social Contract is so much better, it is pithy and you can even sort of guess your way to what it means, it has resisted change over centuries, it far out performs an acronym.
The Categorical Imperative is abstract, badly descriptive and overly intellectual, much like most of Kant. The Categorical Imperative instead of something like Essential Moral Principle or anything that sort of pointed at what was meant is really a sort of acronym in words, you need to be an expert to know what it means.
This is why the Social Contract is a phrase used by common people in many languages, and the Categorical Imperative is used by Philosophers - generally only when discussing Kant specifically.
Information density in the English language is higher than in romance languages, and that's great for work.
I vastly prefer to write documentation in English.
I, on the other hand, still prefer more indulgently verbose languages when it comes to lyricism and entertainment. There's a charm to it.
The relative lack of conjugation and declension seems to hurt by constraining word order and reducing opportunities for sound similarity. Of course having rhymes be common also tends to reduce their impact.
Inflection (I think) is part of the cause of extra syllables, so has multiple impacts.
The length itself does seem to add something to the flow/lyricism, but I wonder if there is also a stronger sense of sound whereas English may be more a little more chaotic (not just having multiple roots but borrowing words more often).
Convenience for the writer at the expense of the reader.
Convenience is no excuse to be unclear.
These names given to a thing may last for decades. Starting out naming them ambiguously is lazy and irresponsible.
Like pronouns, the 'antecedent' may be unclear causing difficulty for the reader. However, pronouns and abbreviations can help communication and be convenient to the reader.
Acronyms have the advantage of being pronounceable and so treated more naturally as words.
Like jargon, when the context is a historical first reference rather than first reference within a text of moderate length, the meaning can be obscure to those not familiar with the context. (One of my college essays was faulted for using "inertia" in the physics sense, specifically that a body in motion tends to remain in motion which is contrary to the common use of inert/inactive/unmoving. It was a natural use to me, particularly for the image used, but it was wrong for the audience.)
Assuming familiarity is a common human flaw (xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501 ). As has been mentioned this can also be used for in-group/expertise signalling. Yet density in communication does have value. (Math would certainly be tedious if every proof started from axioms.)
I agree that being unclear is bad, especially for mere convenience. On the other hand being verbose can be tedious and even insulting (by implying a lack of familiarity with matters obvious to the reader).
I thought the main problem with initialisms was not ambiguity but unfamiliarity. Yes, there are many AMAs and sometimes the local context is insufficient to remove ambiguity (in which cases the initialism might be expanded for clarity or context clues added). However, my experience has been more often that intialisms had no meaning to me (beyond immediate context) -- a vocabulary issue -- than my being uncertain which meaning was intended (ambiguity).
Specialized terms like the "Social Contract" can use capitalization to indicate a jargon use and the plain sense of the words does give some clues to the intent, but such can also risk a false sense of comprehension. The writer would actually be depending on the reader's familiarity with the jargon use.
(I wish Page Table Cache had been adopted instead of Translation Lookaside Buffer even though tee el bee seems to flow more more easily from the tongue. Besides being more complete -- a TLB also caches permissions and other page table entry information and could cache page directory entries -- "cache" has a modern jargon sense closer to the typical design and "lookaside" typically does not apply to L2 TLBs.)
Communication is difficult and taking the time to choose the very best writing is rare. Even with care, migration of word meaning or connotation can make a choice worse than alternatives (and the migration can be across cultures and not just across time).
[I am not concise, but I still like initialisms.]
> On the other hand being verbose can be tedious and even insulting (by implying a lack of familiarity with matters obvious to the reader)
Being overly clear (and perhaps verbose as a result) would only be perceived as insulting by an insecure fool. Clarity is objectively a good thing in comms.
Tedious? Sure. Very long expansions of initialisms written over and over perhaps. I have no problem with a term being expanded once before being abbreviated after.
For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea. In CAP it’s about linearizability, while in ACID it’s about preserving invariants.
But wouldn't people still be unaware of the difference in meaning if the acronyms were spelled out? The word "consistency" appears in both names, with no indication that its meaning is context-dependent. I don't think you can lay the blame for this one at the feet of the acronyms.
You will always have to dumb it down for upper management. As soon as the acronyms come out, they will delay making decisions so that they don't have to take questions or be held accountable. If there is an acronym they use that's spelled the same way but means something totally different, you will have to avoid using yours even when it's the most appropriate term to avoid confusion.
My favorite example is ServiceNow using the term "CI" for "configuration item". You'll have to tell them in a lot more words what the deployment process is. :)
There are at least a couple posters here with a clear background as USMC or similar whose insightful comments on geopolitics read like a sitrep from CENTCOM and get routinely called out to expand their acronyms.
American cultural affectations tend to take over on the Internet, and you know you’re talking with one when they expect you to be familiar with stuff like ACA (Affordable Care Act) or SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States)
EDIT: spent 3 minutes on Reddit and they can’t stop going on about the USMNT. The only country to use an acronym for their football national team.
What's USMC?
What's CENTCOM?
What's USMNT?
I wouldn't have to ask any of this were these expanded. Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms do nothing but to burden the reader for the sake of conveniencing the writer.
“Oh but everyone here knows what AI means,” you say, and yet that’s what the very authors you complain about said too.
Although that would make a cool number plate. Someone called Kate should get k8s c4r as her number plate. It would be an accurate description and also s4dly confusing.
If you don't understand anything I've written, you can catch my technical sales pitches here: https://t7ls3sp5s.com
For example, I'll take "react-internationalization" over "react-i18n" for a package name any day.
Why obscure anything unless a clear problem was solved doing it, that warrants the ambiguity?
P.S. The response is a ridiculous non sequitur -- I didn't say anything either for or against such terms, just that their meaning can be discerned.
But I would note that all of language requires all readers to be familiar with terms and their meanings. And specifically, if people aren't familiar with the notion of language-independent code then they aren't likely to understand what "internationalization" refers to, and if they are familiar with the topic then they almost certainly know what i18n means ... and the time and effort that it took to learn it is infinitesimal relative to all the other language and meanings that they have acquired.
Further, the whole argument from this person is intellectually dishonest nonsense. They claim that terms like HTTP and NASA are "at the expense of the reader", which is simply false. I and most other readers would far prefer to see these acronyms and initialisms than to have them spelled out every time. (And it would be a disaster if http were spelled out in URLs -- and it would be a disservice to the reader to spell that out.)
Literary culture is so confusing.
Anyway, the editorial rule is to spell it out on the first use and then to abbreviate it:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced today... ...NASA says...
Many articles fail to do this and assume insider knowledge. It's all fine and good after you look it up or if you're an expert and familiar with the topic. Good for you. For everyone else, in other disciplines, or lay people, or for students, it's nice to extend the courtesy of spelling it out once.
For example, I work in hospitality bookkeeping/accounting. Back in 2018 on a call with Chowly I learned Third-Party Online Ordering (TOOS) to refer to the then growing list of companies such as Caviar, Grubhub, DoorDash, etc.
Meanwhile I continued to hear from colleagues a variety of descriptive nouns such as, delivery platform, third-party delivery, delivery apps.
Which was OK, until the market diversified and actual delivery companies appeared, Relay chief among them.
So when someone spoke of delivery-something the question was are you talking about food ordering or food delivery platform?
Funny, but a controlled vocabulary goes with bookkeeping like peas with carrots.
As an aside, i have to spend some time on the phone with vendors and got tired of the dogs breakfast of words used to spell out a serial number or email, Irving-Boy-Momma, Ice-Ball-Monday, and other endless variations. Now I’m Nato compliant, haha. India-Bravo-Mike.
Then the question is: what's gained to justify burdening the reader with ambiguity?
Space? In which modern context is space really a problem?
Time? You're just costing the reader time in having think about the meaning and possibly having to look it up
I can't honestly think of any other supposed benefit to collapsing something explicit into something ambiguous. More often than not, the writer is being lazy, short sighted, and in some cases, irresponsible.
When see someone use a lot of these in their daily discourse, I worry about their naming discipline in their code as well.
[1]
Abbreviation: esp. for especially
Initialism: HTTP for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
Acronym: NASA (pronounced as a word) for National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
LoRa (RF tech) vs LORA (AI optimisation technique) GLM (statistics) vs GLM (AI model)
Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...
For example, I work on a product that pulls data about plant species from various data sources. I'm not about to type "Global Registry of Introduced and Invasive Species" or "Global Biodiversity Information Facility" everywhere; everyone on my team, and pretty much anyone working in this problem space, knows them as "GRIIS" and "GBIF." If I wrote the names out every time, it'd probably be less clear to my audience: they'd most likely have to reconstruct the familiar acronyms in their heads to follow what I was talking about.
At the time I didn't know what "Global Biodiversity Information Facility" referred to either, or why it was relevant to my team. Even without the acronym, I still would have had to go look it up or ask about it if someone used it with the expectation I was already familiar with it. I don't think the acronym had any significant effect on my experience of learning the concept.
I believe people who use a lot of (unexpanded) abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms, are lazy in their thinking about context and audience anyway.
The audience can be an assumption, especially in posterity. The context of where the message/document is read, isn't set in stone either.
That’s No Three-Letter Acronyms
Instead we do name things after animals like Lamprey, Remora, Whelk, Axolotl, Tick (the last has not been approved)
But I do think non serious acronyms should be still allowed: YAGNI, YAML, SNAFU, BHAG, GNU, etc.