BP (the company) insists “BP” no longer stands for British Petroleum, since it is no longer wholly British owned. They made a big show of pointing this out in 2010, after the big, not-wholly British Petroleum spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
It also stands for Compulsory Basic Training in the UK- a certificate for motorbike riders saying you’re OK to ride on the road with L plates.
I… never have the same momentary dirty confusion. Honest guv.
Kinda like SAP and SAS.
Yeah, I forgot that the same thing used to happen to me fairly regularly. I finally learned to say that I worked in the computer support department.
It can also mean “Computer Based Training”, which was what we called the interactive training videos new employees had to watch when I worked at Jack in the Box.
Commonwealths can be a republic. The Commonwealth of England was an example, 1649 to 1660.
Next time I have to sit through a 3 hour meeting “brought to you by the FAA” (Fuckin’ Academic Acronyms), I’m going to channel my inner AHunter3 and turn each one into a double entendre that’ll tickle my Not Quite Out Of Third Grade sense of humor.
I know just the woman I’ll sit next to. She’ll love them, and canNOT keep a straight face.
Oh, and I remember as a kid addressing letters with three or four letter state “abbrevs”: Chicago, ILL; Elkhart, IND; Hershey, PENN (Not PENNA). ALA was Alabama, ARK was Arkansas, but we never shortened ALASKA…
[Adrian Cronauer]Excuse me, but if the VP is such a VIP, shouldn’t we put the PC on the QT because if it leaks to the VC he could become an MIA and then we’d all be put on KP.[/Adrian Cronauer]
Okay, and here’s a thing that bugs me as much as unexplained acronyms and initialisms: Dopers who talk about “here” without specifying where they live, and who don’t have their location in their profile, as shown in the top right of every post.
We can’t read your mind, Starving! 
How many abbreviations of subnational entities outside the United States have you learned? You’ve had your entire life to learn them.
The audience here might be heavily American, but a good many of the regular posters are not American and have no reason to learn U.S. postal abbreviations, whether they were instituted in 1963 or 2013.
U.S.-based news media are also on the path away from state name abbreviations. As of 2014, for example, the Associated Press spells out state names in the body of stories (with limited exceptions, e.g., tabular material) in both domestic and international copy.
I’m still trying to figure out what ASAIR stands for. Dinsdale used it in this thread about what do you do when someone parks their car in your driveway, and I’m just not getting it from context.
I even asked in thread.
Every remotely ambiguous acronym should be defined on first usage, especially in mixed company. That’s only courtesy.
IT folks are the bane of my existence. I do a lot of work visa petitions for them. To be successful with a visa petition, the government employee adjudicating it has to believe that the beneficiary has the skillset required to do the job, among other things. I am not an IT person, and the adjudicator isn’t either, so if I can’t understand what the job encompasses, how can I convince anyone that the beneficiary of the petition has the skillset needed to do it?
I did a petition last week for which the job description contained 42 employer-specific acronyms, only 16 of which were defined or even spelled out anywhere. I have literally started developing a glossary of terms for this particular employer so I don’t go insane the next time I have to draft a petition for one of their employees.
Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal
If I use an abbreviation in writing when I’m not corresponding with other IT folks that I know are familiar with my terms, I’ll spell out the term on first usage and put the abbreviation next to it. Something like, “I recommend we purchase a Solid State Drive (SSD) because even though it’s more expensive and has less storage space, an SSD will greatly improve system performance.”
It’s not hard to do and can save you problems later, either having to follow up with an explanation of what you meant, or dealing with the consequences of a misunderstanding.
I puzzled over that one, too. The closest I could come up with was AFAIR (As Far As I Recall) S for Sure instead, maybe?
As Soon As It’s Ready?
That’s the first thing that popped in my head.
Well, see, the thread was about an abandoned car that showed up in his driveway, and you know where those usually come from. Yeah, the whole thing was… “As Skokie As I Remember”.
A grateful nation is saluting you, hope you can feel it!
Seems to me like there are two sets of using abbreviations and acronyms: those who do it in order to signify some in-group status; and those who honestly believe that in the room they are in the abbreviations communicate clearly to the overwhelming majority of the readers.
The former clearly deserve Pitting.
The latter? Not so much so. One does not need to spell out all the words to FBI or CIA or USA. In the room of a message board one can write LOL and IMHO. On these fora one can refer to whether a thread should be in GD or GQ with an expectation of being understood. In an elections thread the meaning of PA and WI are clear.
Now some honestly misjudge the room or the context sometimes. It is sometimes surprising that the shorthand you thought everyone uses and knows is actually not known by people outside your usual bubble. Yeah, reasonable to err with spelling it out at least on first usage. But begrudging shorthand PA in a thread about elections? That’s absurd for that room.
Like cliches popular internet acronyms survive because people find them useful to convey meaning efficiently. I read tweets using TIL a bunch of times before I bothered looking the meaning up, but once I did it became perfectly understandable why it was created and why it persists.
Ditto SMH, which I actually took to mean “So much hate”, but is convenient short hand for “Shaking my head.”
It’s important though to realize that a well established acronym isn’t unpacked into the words it stands for and then read, it’s a word in and of itself. You might have to think “discombobulate? oh, like bewilder” the first few times you encounter that word, but eventually you just know the real meaning of discombobulate. Most users of ASAP (which can be pronunciated a-sap or spelled out depending on the emphasis you want to place on it) aren’t using it interchangeably with “as soon as possible”.
HTH
I always thought it was “Smack my head.” :smack: