Rolls off the tongue well, like my two favorite military acronyms SNAFU and FUBAR.
Those two are from WW2 or maybe a little earlier.
The first time I saw a personal ad placed by an “SWM”, I thought he was referring to himself as a Short White Male. I soon learned the “S” stood for “Single”.
When I was a kid, I was looking at a picture of an astronaut with a NASA patch on his spacesuit, and my mother asked me if I knew what the acronym stood for. My guess was “North America South America”. In my defense, neither of the “A” words of National Aeronautics and Space Administration were yet in my working vocabulary.
I just looked through this whole thread looking for the definition of POSSLQ, didn’t find it, clicked the link, had to click another link, and finally learned that POSSLQ means a person of the opposite sex sharing living quarters. I decided to post this in case anyone else was wondering the same thing and didn’t want to go to all that effort.
I saw ads for DARE for years without know what the acronym stood for, so I just figured it meant Drugs Are Real Evil.
Thank you. I wondered, too, but not enough to Google it.
That might be a better synopsis of their actual position.
I learned of POSSLQ via this poem.
I was curious, so I went googling.
No one really seems sure exactly when it started. The acronym definitely became popularized during the Vietnam War.
By the 1970s it had been popularized to the point where it showed up in print. In the early 1970s it showed up in a US Naval Academy humor magazine as a comic named the Bohica brothers.
BOHICA may have existed before the Vietnam era, but if it did it wasn’t popular.
Heh. Not an acronym, but…
I always thought that saying someone gave you a ration of shit. Was actually someone gave you a rash and a shit. Seemed odd. I was probably in my 50’s before the light went on on that one.
And at first I thought “MILF” meant “mother-in-law fetish”.
Makes equal sense in porno pseudo-fetish lingo.
When I first started seeing it I kept thinking BIPOC had something to do with bisexuals. I still have a hard time reading it otherwise even though I know it’s got nothing to do with that.
Yep. Puzzled me for a while.
But I knew what RPG meant, in role playing since 1974.
Yeah, confused the crap outta me.