Others used - IANAL (I am not a lawyer) and ATM (at the moment).
I got a kick out of when my parents got on the internet also. Welcome brovolone!
The Vietnam war seemed to provide a good one when "I was there"type stories are being told: NSTRH (no shit, this really happened) or TINS (this is no shit).
My favorite initialization is one I haven’t seen in years: TINLC: There Is No Lumber Cartel. Popular with anti-spammers around the turn of the century after they were accused in a pro-spam conspiracy theory of secretly acting on behalf of the dead tree media sector to wipe out electronic advertising. Any mention of the Lumber Cartel was appended (tinlc), including membership numbers in people’s email sigs.
One I’ve seen here, mainly in “truther” threads, is WONJCT.
Whacked-Out Nut-Job Conspiracy Theorist.
TIL stands for Today I learned. I just learned that, today actually.
I was on this board for a couple of years before I realized that “QFT” meant “Quoted For Truth” rather than “Quite Fucking True.” The beauty, though, is that in just about every scenario, either interpretation works.
ION nobody really cares if they can’t figure out WTFYM, because LIS and YOLO. A long time ago on another board we came up with ACROs (that were really intiials of course), even adding them to Acrofinder, it used to drive the Mods nuts, because they didn’t know what was being communicated.
I saw that one for the first time just today. I didn’t know what the heck it was, context gave no clues. It looked like they were referring to a username rather than a generic acronym.
One that confused me for a long time was FTW, because it used to mean “Fuck The World!” but that didn’t make sense in recent usage. It now means the opposite: “For The Win!”. Took me ages to figure that out.
never heard of it, never saw that on any other board. You have a source?
The board’s demographic is ninety percent people fighting ignorance and ten percent kinky dyslexics.
Re: SWIM
I came across this one when looking to taper my (legally prescribed for panic disorder) Xanax dosage with the fewest of side effects. In addition to message boards devoted to those in my situation (such as mental health support communities or people seeking assistance w/benzo withdrawal), I found several sites for recreational drug users.
The most popular one (and really the only one I remember) is Bluelight–Here’s it’s Wikipedia entry–which says it’s devoted to “harm reduction” from using recreationals like MDMA, benzos, et al.
They request that members only discuss the drug-using actions of “someone who isn’t me” – seems dubious but I guess they want plausible deniability? Since they’ve been around for years it must work!
So that answers your question. Not linking directly to it, just in case the SDMB prefers it that way. But that’s one, and there are certainly others.
HTH*
- Hope that helps.
I knew TL;DR stood for “too long; didn’t read” but I was confused the first time I encountered teal deer. I originally thought it might be related to a grass mud horse.
Yep, and explains why I never heard of it as well. Back in the day, we would start any post about anything controversial/illegal with “I have this friend …”
Same concept
You’re very welcome, and yep, it is the same concept.
As an aside, I want to apologize to everyone in the world for using “it’s” instead of “its” in the link text in my earlier post. That kinda sloppiness is pretty frickin’ embarrassing for an editor! I throw myself on the mercy of the SDMB court.
TLA=Three letter acronym (or abbreviation)
XTLA = Extended three letter acronym. XTLA is an XTLA.
The board’s demographic is ten percent people fighting ignorance and ninety percent kinky dyslexics.
You got those numbers backwards, FTFY. 
FFLA = Four or Five Letter Acronym.
TANSTAAFL!!
Thank you for this information. I was unaware.
For some reason my Galaxy keeps autocorrecting “intialism” to “initialise.” It is not recognizing initialism as a word, which I think may contribute to the ignorance of people, like myself, regarding this word and unrecognized initialisms such as “IIRC.”
I wonder if iOs recognizes the word “initialism.”
I didn’t even know it was a thing. It makes perfect sense though.
Acronyms:
SCUBA
SNAFU
FUBAR
Not acronyms:
ROTFLMAOSTC
YMMV
NCIS