I realized I have a very primal reaction to a pet peeve.
Was out with a group of students and teachers (after a night class), and one woman kept going on and on about “DDD”: “So, DDD did a thing on… Waiting for DDD to come on, I made myself an egg… Oh MY GAAAAHD, did anyone see? DDD was inSAYYYYNE!” I thought it was a Millennial thing (she’s 30), but the others were giving quizzical glances whenever she said it. She tends to hog the discussion, so no one wanted to ask and prolong her stories, but finally I couldn’t take it any more… “Sorry, what’s DDD?”
I got the most withering stare, then an eyeroll, and after a beat she sneered, “Only Diner, Dives and Drive-Ins, gaaaahd…”
At least it wasn’t like playing poker with my scientist friends. Man, the acronyms! They assume you know your GMS from your GOES (I looked them up at home… different types of satellites). And the one I know best is so literate that he makes obscure references to classic thinkers. Last time I said “I wish I could click on our conversation and get footnotes”, he said “C’mon, you can’t seriously have missed the Faulkner reference…”
The fact that he said this in front of a group of friends made me feel… well, there’s the problem. I don’t like to feel stupid. And people using terms and references that they assume everyone knows makes me feel like I’m not keeping up.
In my lexicon, DDD means Daily Dose of Disappointment. It’s related to how I’m constantly looking for collectibles that are released on a distinctly non-constant schedule, resulting the term describing what I’m really going to the store to get.
And computer science is positively rife with acronyms, particularly TLAs.
I used to deal with IT vendors on a regular basis. Every one of them would use acronyms when we were meeting with them. It finally got to the point where I had to open a meeting with a proclamation that nobody would use acronyms during the upcoming meeting. They learned rather quickly that they needed to follow that rule.
This happens a lot on the SDMB. A LOT. Among twits socializing in real life it’s going to happen and there’s not much you can do. People are idiots. But I never expected to find so much of it here. Maybe it’s because everyone does it on Facebook or when they’re texting friends but here I would think people would avoid being vague like the plague.
But nope. I think’s it’s actually the reverse–people get off on knowing and using niche jargon here. If you’re gonna do that, at least use the actual jargon words instead of acronyms and initialisms that nobody could ever know.
