The Americenticism is strong with this one…
You can take your opinion and shove it. Who died and elected you the fucking Form Police?
Or maybe, just maybe, this is not a technical writing forum?
Whenever I encounter this issue of unexplained acronyms, it screams American centric, to me.
Americans tend to assume if it’s in common use in America, the rest of the world should just bloody catch up!
It’s just poor form really. International publications like The Economist stick to a protocol wherein it’s first usage is spelled out, after that free use of acronym.
How hard is that to understand? Or use? Seems easy enough to me.
About 50% of the time I just exit the thread, especially if it’s in the OP. Screw-in, if they wanted a conversation they should have been clear.
It comes off like someone using industry specific jargon, just so they’ll sound/feel clever when asked to clarify. Ugh!
It’s amazing to me the anger people seem to feel when faced with something they don’t know- a vocabulary word or jargon. That they assume the user is somehow insulting them because I guess they knew the reader wouldn’t know the word and they were trying to be elitist, or a know it all, or a power play etc.
I can get mild annoyance, but this apparent perspective that if someone says something that I didn’t know they must be trying to insult me is beyond my comprehension.
Yeah it’s ZIGWAT.
Or none of the above ? And it’s never good form to jump into a thread just to drop a turd about how you feel about an acronym that mystifies you to the point of hyper focusing on that acronym while contributing nothing else to the conversation. Because that’s what you do virtually 100% of the time, with snark.
Unless the author us busting down your door and holding a gun to your head shouting “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GOOGLE IT MOTHERFUCKER”, this claim is ridonculous.
When someone uses an acronym I’m not familiar with, I’ve got several choices:
- Pause and try to figure it out from context (“TLA” was super clear, given that puzzlegal had just been talking about how she “never google[s] 3 letter acronyms”).
- Look it up.
- Shrug and keep on reading.
- Politely ask, “Hey, what’s ‘BVR’ mean?”
- Post some snarky demand that people stop using acronyms I’m not familiar with.
- Beg the gunman to spare my life while I google.
There’s no particular reason to choose 5, IMNSHO.
There’s no reason to put someone in the situation where they have to do 1-4 when it’s so trivially easy to just spell it out the first time.
I was surprised how many people stumbled on that one. I admit I thought it’s use was funny in context.
Problem is, unless you never ever use any acronym or you will always run the risk that the acronym you believe to extremely commonplace isn’t to someone else.
I think we can all agree that never using any acronyms isn’t really reasonable,
So, inevitably, an acronym will be used that someone won’t get because we all have different ideas of what’s obvious and what’s arcane. What should that person do about it when they see an acronym they don’t know- act like a jerk, be all offended, or do one of the reasonable things listed?
That isn’t the case in any of the ones that I Love Me has been complaining about. They are all clearly obscure.
There’s a big difference between petulantly demanding to know what BBC or CNN stands for and spewing something like BVR with no explanation
I actually had to Google UNICEF. And it took me longer (10 seconds, vice 5) to figure out than BVR. That’s what using a “widely known” acronym can get you, if you think you’re the arbiter of what is or isn’t widely known, entitled to sark openly on those who don’t live up to your standards.
Of course there’s a reason. There are multiple reasons:
- A writer isn’t a professional author, and commits a minor faux pas in writing. This happens all the goddamned time on this board. People misspell words, use pronouns without antecedents, have dangling participles, use too few or too many paragraph breaks, use too few or too many commas, and so on.
- The reader is more ignorant than the intended audience. If I want to discuss Putin’s history, must I write that he rose through the ranks of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB), or may I use the acronym? I’m assuming the latter is acceptable, because I’m assuming most adults know what the KGB is. Other acronyms are extremely common, and I might as well use them.
- The author is dashing off a post quickly, and it doesn’t seem like it’s worth their time to spell out long acronyms.
- The author thinks that spelling out an acronym would either be confusing (see KGB above) or distracting. FWIW (for what it’s worth), the latter is gonna pop up all the time.
Even if it’s #1 or #3, that doesn’t justify being a dick to the author. Do you regularly correct misspellings, poor punctuation, pronouns without antecedents, etc? If so, you’re being a dick.
I understand I went over the line and, yeah, was not cleaver/funny in the least. I accept whatever ridicule that gets me. Again, my apologies.
Unclear to you- that’s kind of my point. There isn’t a set of universally known acronyms, so if someone uses one that you don’t know, why be a jerk about it? Take a minute to figure it out, or ask. What’s the big deal?
I’m going to backtrack a little. I’ve been persuaded that the pittee is ruder than necessary when asking people to explain their acronyms.
Nonetheless, all the examples given were cases where I appreciated have the acronym explained, so from my perspective, he’s still improving the flow of the thread. I can skip over some testy language faster than I can research an acronym. They really aren’t very easy to google, and anyway, googling makes me leave the page, and maybe lose my place when I try to return to the Dope. (I usually read on my phone, where there’s only one thing visible. And for reasons, I often lose my place when I leave a page.)
I’m firmly on team “don’t overuse acronyms”. But I also know that sometimes I don’t want to type a lot of letters, either, and sometimes the acronym seems obvious. (And god knows I make a ton of typos, I can hardly get upset if others write imperfectly.) So yeah, better to ask politely.
In the spirit of reconciliation, I am going to unignore @I_Love_Me_Vol.I, and maybe we can all learn to be more thoughtful with our use of acronyms on the one hand, and not so snarky in asking for clarification about acronyms on the other.
I think that sums up the OP’s point pretty well.
The OP is not defending using acronyms, per se, but is calling out someone who has made it their mission to complain about acronyms in an unhelpful, snarky way. It’s calling out this obnoxious obsession with finger wagging at people who made the apparently unforgivable mistake of using an acronym he did not know.
ETA replying to puzzlegal, but discourse software…
Chester Alan Arthur in a hammock(CAAIAH)! Do you expect me to look up the translation for that? We use English on this board!
Only if his rudeness and the pushback against it isn’t disruptive, which, well, look at the threads…