It was Dilbert asking Wally if he wanted to join his TTP project, and Wally responded at the end with “I’d rather be your arch-nemesis.”
Are you serious? How do you imagine this playing out? Do you stop reading and hit reload until someone replies, then continue reading? Or do you just google it?
OP: Hear, hear.
Acronyms are supposed to be clever and obscure. It’s often the only time us peons who design and build the stuff get to have a little fun.
I like recursive acronyms, like MINCE (Mince is not complete EMACS) and MUNG (Mung until no good).
You actually have to SEARCH and THINK to find out the meaning of an acronym? Quelle horreur!
Lazy POS.
Assuming this isn’t a whoosh:
I find it quite annoying when I encounter a completely new abbreviation that the author doesn’t bother to explain and isn’t clear from context, as I either have to break the flow of the narrative for a while, and try to find out what the author’s talking about, or read on and be fairly confused.
Yes. It’s rather bad form and, indeed, really fucking annoying, not to spell out non-obvious acronyms in full on first reference. I had the same issues with AGW and CAGW.
Point of sale?
Port of Spain?
Perceived Organizational Support?
Poly-Ovarian Syndrome?
You’ve got me. I know I’m a lazy something or other.
In 12th grade, I had Physics and Chemistry as two separate subjects (until then it had always been one), with two separate teachers.
One of them gave us minimal space in his exams. Nothing had to be defined unless the definition was explicitly requested in the problem’s header, and you had to be very concise in order to fit answers in.
The other made us define every single symbol and write down an explanation in between any two equations. If you were moving from
a + b = c
to
a = c - b
in between you needed to explain that “when changing an item from one side of the equation to the other, positive signs become negative, and vice versa.”
So the same problem would have required 1/3 of a page with the first teacher, about 3 pages with the second.
It sure came handy in college, when a teacher came in and wrote Ye Goode Olde Gas Equation (PV=nRT) in greek letters. My classmates freaked out, I just raised my hand and asked whether we could use any symbol we felt like, as long as it was defined. The teacher, very surprised after verifying that none of us had ever seen PV=nRT written in any form other than PV=nRT, said yes. Phew!
Using symbols of any kind without defining them should be punishable by public spanking :mad:
There’s something wrong with saying “Subtracting b from both sides…”?
You realize, don’t you, DangleYourModifier, that you yourself didn’t say what the “C” stood for in CAGW in your Original Post? I’d of been pissed, except someone else supplied it a couple of entries down.
The newspaper I read most often - The Age - has this annoying editing where they have a writer introduce an abbreviation or acronym and then never use it again in the whole article.