Acronyms

Yet again this blog piece is nothing much to do with Myanmar; my apologies, I can’t seem to bring Myanmar to light except through my own head filter.

So today, as I’ve probably mentioned before, I need to talk about acronyms. They’re supposed to be beneficial and make life easier for people but recently, as I sit here trying to do a job in a remote town with few links to the outside world, I can’t see how they do anything more than breed confusion. And they do breed. During one of my first jobs, as an order picker at a clothes factory in Rutland, England, we discussed shortening the word ‘warehouse’, because we used it so often.

Let’s just call it the ‘ware’, someone suggested.

Or the ‘house’

We should just call it the ‘W’

’W’ has 3 syllables in it, I said. Warehouse only has 2; it’s easier to just call it ‘warehouse’

Oh yeah

The suggestions of either ‘ware’ or ‘house’ were preferable in the context of the discussion, but only to save one lonely syllable. Generally, word or term shortening is pointless. The letter ‘W’ should (almost) never be in an acronym; if it is hidden in an acronym, it’s probably wasting time. It’s the equivalent of a late substitution in a football game. Only the WI can barely get away with it, because ‘institute’ is such an annoying word. I suppose it would be technically simpler to call it the ‘Women’s I’, but that doesn’t come across very well. Nobody wants to hear you discuss women’s ‘i’s.

WHO is another. That’s double ‘u’, aich, oh. It’s a 5 syllable brain teaser to say three letters. We’re all better off calling it the World Health O, and then we can all save ourselves 2 syllables each time. Over a lifetime that’s probably enough syllables saved to feed a starving family for a year. A syllable saved is a syllable earned. Imagine all the times you’ve said ‘www’ and didn’t save time by saying ‘world wide web’ instead. Even George Bush cut it down by a third.

Acronyms are not needed for single syllable words and are only required for multiple syllable words at a push. Yesterday, I was looking for the meaning of the acronym ‘PSF’ in the context of sanitation activities Merlin recently finished, so I googled it and discovered more than 20 alternative interpretations. These included: Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, Prolate Spheroidal wave Functions, Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, and Price per Square Foot. It took me more than 15 minutes to eventually find what I was after (we have very slow internet here), but somebody could have just saved me all that time-wasting by writing down ‘Pond Sand Filter’. It was a 4 syllable term, which had been conveniently shortened to a 3 syllable term.

I can understand their use in text-speak, because text messages take a while to write out and they are, in most cases, widely known, such as LOL and LMAO. LOL has even become a single-syllable word in itself and has yet retained its meaning, which I like. That’s language evolving and being useful. If people in the aid world called the WHO the ‘hoo’ it would be both funny and useful, but they don’t; they make it, literally, 5 times more difficult to say.

And as a favour to you all, I’m going to acronymise (new word?) that last sentence - IPITAWCTWTHIWBBFAUBTDTMILFTMDTS. Look that up on google.