Sure, but she is not so well known that just her initials will ID her. I mean, she’s no AOC. Or JFK, etc
She was referred to by her full name before the acronym was used.
I was one of those. I recognized the name “Huckabee” as a former disgraced and disgraceful governor from Arkansas. And a former R presidential wannabe. So I suspected this woman was a) related somehow, and b) a politician from or connected to Arkansas. I had no I idea what roles she may ever have held or held now. Or why I should care.
The roster of 150-ish disgraced cabinet members & close insiders of the trump administration are far too numerous and far too vile a hive of scum and villainy to bother remembering the names of anyone except the criminal-in-chief.
Fair enough. The parade of Trump press secretaries (remember the “Scaramucci,” defined as “A unit of time equal to the duration of Anthony Scaramucci’s tenure as White House press secretary”?) was sufficiently entertaining that they have pretty good name recognition with me. But there’s lots of other stuff a lot of people would consider common knowledge that I am clueless about.
Agreed. In this context MSM and FOIA function as words that most who are interested in politics are familiar with. Or should be. They are not sub specialist jargon.
For what it’s worth (FWIW) my own stylistic is to consciously avoid in-group word choice as much as possible. But if as a reader I sometimes need to make a contextual deduction or even look something up, well that goes to the reducing my ignorance side of the balance sheet.
There was no smilie in the remark about the “unwashed masses”.
I do detect a whole heap of sarcasm in your “deeply deeply apologize” comment here though
You might be better off not telling people what their own mental state is.
I take no offense on this matter. It is a very high bar for me to take offense.
When a person uses too many acronyms without explanation it is a barrier to communication and off-putting to those unfamiliar with the terms.
In excess it gives off a certain exclusionary vibe and it is a barrier to engagement from those not in the know.
Yes, this is part of why I consider the post in question clear and inoffensive. I went back and had another look at it and I’ll make the following further observations:
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The sidetrack here about who Sarah Huckabee Sanders is is completely irrelevant because the first sentence of the post says it’s about Arkansas and the first time her name is spelled out it’s preceded by “Gov”. So even if you know nothing about her, it’s perfectly clear: the post is about “a scandal down in Arkansas”, and she is the “Gov”.
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On this “FOIA” business again – I stand by my position that this is a very, very common initialism in journalism, but even if you didn’t know what it meant, its first appearance in context is “A blogger/reporter filed a FOIA request afterwards for expense reports for the trip” – so the meaning is clear regardless: a reporter filed a request to see the expense reports for the trip.
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With one glaring exception, that entire post – with a bit of minor stylistic editing – could have been a perfectly acceptable newspaper article. The one sentence that really stands out like a sore thumb is “Turns out the company who made the podium is owned by a BFF of SHS”. I suspect that if the sentence had read “Turns out the company that made the podium is owned by a close friend of Sanders” perhaps this whole kerfuffle wouldn’t have happened, because all the other initialisms have been used here many times before without causing any angst.
The objection to BFF was the most bizarre part for me - I wasn’t joking when I made the comparison to LOL in my OP. It’s just standard shorthand for “close friend” now. Not just online, either - Friends covered it, albeit as a novelty … in 1997. It’s been in the dictionary for more than a decade.
There is no context outside formal settings/writing where it is “odd” to use. And posts on this board are not formal writing, even in the debate-y forums.
The issue is repeated moderator action based on imaginary rules derived from personal, often misguided posting preferences.
In formal writing (and P&E is one of our more formal fora), the bar for “common enough to not require expansion on first use” is extremely high. High enough that you expand basically everything on first use rather than getting pinged to greater or lesser impact later on.
And before anybody jumps on me about the Dope not being a research paper, yes, obviously. But rules like that exist to maximize clarity and minimize confusion, which are both polite considerations regardless of whether you’re angling for publication.
If the reader has to hunt for context clues, such as by referencing an abbreviation against an embedded link later in the post, then that’s a failure to provide clarity whether or not the reader figures it out. Likewise for googling a term, even if it’s the first result in a search.
There’s no such thing as “everybody knows” or “everybody has heard of,” and clear writing reflects that. Getting into the weeds about whether this or that abbreviation is a “term of art*” is missing the point.
*I’d never heard that term before this thread. Neat.
I would not have known what TPM or MSM were referring to (if I had read that thread before this one), but I might have figured out TPM from the context.
I would have recognized FOIA, GOP, and BFF.
I think I would have understood SHS from the context, but my first thought was “that’s where I went to high school.” There are a few people who are recognizable from their initials alone, like FDR, JFK, or AOC, but SHS is not one of them.
A standard in writing (for, say, a news article) is to mention someone’s full name and generally a brief description or title (to explain their relevance to the story) and then proceed with their last name for the sake of brevity. With Sarah, her last name is Huckabee Sanders, and that’s awkward to repeat. So you go for the informal Sarah, or the Huckabee Sanders mouthful, or just make it real easy and do SHS. I think that seems like a reasonable thing to do after making it clear who you are talking about.
You could take the extra step and make it obvious, for example the first time you mention her name you write “Sarah Huckabee Sanders (SHS)” and then just write SHS after that. That prevents any ambiguity. I use that often in my professional life, as an IT person I have lots of jargon but I often communicate with people who won’t understand the terms I use.
And this doesn’t change even when the name of the person has been spelled out in the preceding paragraph and the reader could figure it out. Unless it has become widespread practice to refer to someone that way (like AOC) I don’t see why introducing a novel initialism “SHS” has any advantage of economy or clarity over “Sanders”. I think it can become a leet vs noob shibboleth thing, just like using “leet” and “noob” when ordinary language would suffice.
Of course, this isn’t always true. In the Oscars thread, there was obvious utility of economy in everyone starting to use EEAAO.
I totally agree with this as a general rule. Much better the obvious e.g. “Jones” over the non-obvious e.g. “BFJ”.
But I also just learned that
And now I have a new problem in that dropping that two-word nonhyphenated mess into each sentence would be bad too.
I can see why that poster slipped into using “SHS” as the least awkward alternative. I wonder if local Arkansas print or online written media use SHS commonly. My own much used “LSL” are the initials of the town I used to live in. A usage unheard of two counties away, but an utterly common universally understood local usage in our town and the adjoining ones.
I think WE did fine. And Mods do not need a rule to write a note.
Agreed. It’s been in everyday language for gosh knows how long now. It shows up in New York Times crosswords, which to me means when they are using “hip” slang, it’s at least a few years old, as they tend not to be on the cutting edge of these things, although there are some younger constructors now that do actually introduce me to some fairly recent neologisms. (Looking it up, it first appeared in an NYT crossword in 2011, though it didn’t regularly start showing up until 2020, where it appeared six times).
BFF is so unhip that I think it’s obscure for being so out of date. It’s like early 2000s slang.
That said, searching for BFF on the boards reveals plenty of uses. But a significant majority of these are in the MMP threads, which are informal even by MPSIMS standards, which are already informal by the standards of other sub-boards. Feels out of place in P&E (though usage there isn’t totally unheard of).
Well, my kids are Generation Alpha and I hear and see them use the acronym, so it still seems to be in use. One Google trends graph I saw showed spikes in 2008 and 2018 for the term.
If you are speaking only to those “in the know”, how is ignorance fought on behalf of people that aren’t?
In the what, now?
Just kidding. I know what MMP is.