I’ll assume that those are the ones who aren’t there on academic scholarships. :rolleyes:
Those of us from the hated cross-town rival usually pronounced UCLA as UCK-luh with a slight gagging sound on the k. Done right, it sounds very close to a drawled “ugly”. Go Trojans on Sunday!!
I too have almost never heard UPS pronounced other than as three separate letters. Except maybe by excited 6 year old kids who can hardly wait to see what Grandma sent for their birthday.
I work in public health and I’ve only heard “the W-H-O” never “who”. I’d think the speaker was an idiot if they tried to pronounce it as a word.
We call it the Oops Truck all the time. Working in a medical supply field, I see all the problems they seem to have with our packages. It seems fitting.
Here are two thunks, one of which I think was hinted at up-thread, and one that I didn’t see mentioned yet. (I am using “acronym” here to refer to any type of initialism, not just an easily pronounceable one.)
-
The more easily pronounceable it is, the more likely to be pronounced as a word, in particular if the pronounced word is easily recognizable as the acronym.
-
Related to that, a pronounced acronym should somehow voice all the letters in the acronym. Otherwise, the pronounced word is not easily recognized as the acronym.
Case in point: WHO, if pronounced as the word “who” sounds like “hoo” (rhymes with too, moo, glue). Where’s the W in that? The W is silent, and thus the listener, hearing “hoo”, doesn’t immediately think WHO.
I think it also helps if the pronounced word is two or more syllables.
Contrast with “ASCI” (as mentioned above), pronounced “ass-kee” (I beg your pardon! 
) Here the pronounced word voices every letter in the acronym, and is thus immediately recognizable. Likewise with ACORN, for example. So does WYSIWYG for that matter.
ASCI and ACORN work well when pronounced as words according to these ideas. UPS, less so because it’s only one syllable. WHO, pronounced “hoo”, fails all these tests, and thus doesn’t work well when pronounced as a word.
Consider this: The Free Software Foundation uses the acronym GNU (allegedly standing “GNU’s Not Unix”), which is very emphatically to be pronounced G’Noo, and not like “noo” (the animal). Furthermore, they go to vast contortions to come up with a name starting with G or better still GN for as many of their programs as possible. It’s become an entrenched tradition that the G is ALWAYS pronounced, even when the name begins with GN. Example: GNOME is pronounced G’Nome (rhymes with home, foam, palindrome). Ditto the game programs gnibbles, gnobots, gnomine, gnometris, and gnotski, et many al.
I agree with Senegoid’s rules of thumb when trying to guess correct usage of something you encounter in print.
A couple data points for our stew …
FYI, it’s ASCII, not ASCI. Which slightly deviates from the must pronounce each letters’ sound rule. At least I’ve never heard anyone say ASS-kee-ee.
Civil aviation pretty much never pronounces its acronyms/initialisms. Historically the vast majority have been 3-letter items and often with zero vowels. Which is to say they tend to be pretty difficult to pronounce even if you want to. In the last 10-15 years more 4-letter acronyms/initialisms have entered the lexicon, and the more vowel-rich of them are being pronounced.
USAF followed civil practice for aviation-related terms. They also tended to not pronounce most non-aviation acronyms. But … The F-16 aircraft was loaded with acronyms for various systems & components, almost all of which *were *pronounced, even the ones with five letters and zero vowels. This was not true of any other aircraft I was familiar with.
The Navy favors syllabic compounds with the Bureau for Ship-Building - West Coast becoming BUSHIPWES in written form and pronounced byu-SHIP-wess. That’s neither an acronym by the formal definition, nor an initialism.