Strange how it doesn’t mention how acronym usage is cultural. Americans and their military love acronyms, and they are very liberal in their usage compared to other languages.
There are at least a couple posters here with a clear background as USMC or similar whose insightful comments on geopolitics read like a sitrep from CENTCOM and get routinely called out to expand their acronyms.
American cultural affectations tend to take over on the Internet, and you know you’re talking with one when they expect you to be familiar with stuff like ACA (Affordable Care Act) or SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States)
EDIT: spent 3 minutes on Reddit and they can’t stop going on about the USMNT. The only country to use an acronym for their football national team.
I wouldn't have to ask any of this were these expanded. Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms do nothing but to burden the reader for the sake of conveniencing the writer.
I agree that acronyms can be overused, especially in marketing.
However, a big part of why Tech, software, computer science, etc. have a lot of acronyms is because there are a lot of new, often abstract things to name, and acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing. And I don't think anyone would really want to write out all of "hypertext transfer protocol" instead of http. And imagine if every url looked like "hypertext-transfer-protocol://world-wide-web.example.commercial/index.hypertext-text-markup-language". And if it had been given some other name, say "hyperprot" would that be any more meaningful than http?
Re: acronyms in English vs spanish.
I wonder if this is related to how human communication has a constant rate of information transfer. From what I understand, spanish is spoken faster, (more syllables per second) but has less information per syllable. One way that english is able to convey more information with less syllables is the use of acronyms and other abbreviations. And this is especially true for professional jargon that you use a lot to speak with colleagues at your job.
> You don’t see Kant writing TCI instead of “The Categorical Imperative” or Rousseau writing TSC instead of “The Social Contract”. You usually see the creation of concepts (Biopolitics by Foucault, Zeitgeist by Herder, Orientalism by Said) or the use of nominalization.
I don't think any of those terms are much better than acronyms. Maybe the name gives you a vague idea of what they refer to, but like many acronyms they are labels for complex ideas that you can't really understand just by knowing what it is called. And these terms can be, and are used for "in-group signalling" in much the same way as acronyms.
Finally, tech is not at all unique in its abundant use of acronyms. I don't know about in other languages but at least in English, Math, Physics, and astronomy also make heavy use of acronyms (ODE, PDE, QED, LCD, AGN, LASER, QCD, SI, CGS, AU, BEC, etc.) And from what I've observed medical and sales professionals also use a lot of acronyms.
when naming the protocol part of a url, obviously you don't want to pick something so verbose, but that doesn't mean you gotta pick an acronym. could be hyper:// or smth. not saying it should be, just saying there are other ways that a more verbose concept can be shorted for certain contexts
>I don't think any of those terms are much better than acronyms
The Social Contract is so much better, it is pithy and you can even sort of guess your way to what it means, it has resisted change over centuries, it far out performs an acronym.
The Categorical Imperative is abstract, badly descriptive and overly intellectual, much like most of Kant. The Categorical Imperative instead of something like Essential Moral Principle or anything that sort of pointed at what was meant is really a sort of acronym in words, you need to be an expert to know what it means.
This is why the Social Contract is a phrase used by common people in many languages, and the Categorical Imperative is used by Philosophers - generally only when discussing Kant specifically.
Really small comment to what you wrote, but that's one of the things that make me love English over my own native language (Spanish): the way you can build and combine words to describe a complex idea, in a way that you would need a full sentence in other languages like French or Spanish.
Information density in the English language is higher than in romance languages, and that's great for work.
I vastly prefer to write documentation in English.
I, on the other hand, still prefer more indulgently verbose languages when it comes to lyricism and entertainment. There's a charm to it.
I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.
Absolutely! I’ll dive into this a bit more in the second section, where even technical acronyms can be considered harmful because they are learned at a surface level and then spread at meme-like speed.
For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea. In CAP it’s about linearizability, while in ACID it’s about preserving invariants.
> For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea.
But wouldn't people still be unaware of the difference in meaning if the acronyms were spelled out? The word "consistency" appears in both names, with no indication that its meaning is context-dependent. I don't think you can lay the blame for this one at the feet of the acronyms.
There's also a power dynamic with which definitions take precedence.
You will always have to dumb it down for upper management. As soon as the acronyms come out, they will delay making decisions so that they don't have to take questions or be held accountable. If there is an acronym they use that's spelled the same way but means something totally different, you will have to avoid using yours even when it's the most appropriate term to avoid confusion.
My favorite example is ServiceNow using the term "CI" for "configuration item". You'll have to tell them in a lot more words what the deployment process is. :)
My pet peeve = authors who start using an acronym without ever "introducing" it. Suddenly there is an acronym used throughout an article, and one has to carefully go back and find the phrase to which it refers. Necessitated because the author was too lazy to introduce the acronym in parens after first using the phrase. Not sure how AI does this, but this problem predates AI by quite a bit.
Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms[1] will always come at the expense of the reader. Saying the reader should know what they mean, is a lazy and short sighted assumption of who's reading and when (today? decades from now?)
Then the question is: what's gained to justify burdening the reader with ambiguity?
Space? In which modern context is space really a problem?
Time? You're just costing the reader time in having think about the meaning and possibly having to look it up
I can't honestly think of any other supposed benefit to collapsing something explicit into something ambiguous. More often than not, the writer is being lazy, short sighted, and in some cases, irresponsible.
When see someone use a lot of these in their daily discourse, I worry about their naming discipline in their code as well.
[1]
Abbreviation: esp. for especially
Initialism: HTTP for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
Acronym: NASA (pronounced as a word) for National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
Acronyms I can handle. What I've always hated is aNz style compressions. a11y, a16z, stuff that you can't even guess at a decoding unless you know it already.
Although that would make a cool number plate. Someone called Kate should get k8s c4r as her number plate. It would be an accurate description and also s4dly confusing.
If you don't understand anything I've written, you can catch my technical sales pitches here: https://t7ls3sp5s.com
I don't have to guess because I'm smart enough to look things up.
P.S. The response is a ridiculous non sequitur -- I didn't say anything either for or against such terms, just that their meaning can be discerned.
But I would note that all of language requires all readers to be familiar with terms and their meanings. And specifically, if people aren't familiar with the notion of language-independent code then they aren't likely to understand what "internationalization" refers to, and if they are familiar with the topic then they almost certainly know what i18n means ... and the time and effort that it took to learn it is infinitesimal relative to all the other language and meanings that they have acquired.
Further, the whole argument from this person is intellectually dishonest nonsense. They claim that terms like HTTP and NASA are "at the expense of the reader", which is simply false. I and most other readers would far prefer to see these acronyms and initialisms than to have them spelled out every time. (And it would be a disaster if http were spelled out in URLs -- and it would be a disservice to the reader to spell that out.)
Yes, let's have each reader spend time and energy all day looking up abbreviations/acronyms/initialisms, so that the single writer can spend a little less time and energy in getting their own point across.
I think context and audience matter a lot. The post seems to mostly be talking about acronyms in the context of writing that's aimed at a public audience, but a lot of acronym use is aimed at a much more targeted audience.
For example, I work on a product that pulls data about plant species from various data sources. I'm not about to type "Global Registry of Introduced and Invasive Species" or "Global Biodiversity Information Facility" everywhere; everyone on my team, and pretty much anyone working in this problem space, knows them as "GRIIS" and "GBIF." If I wrote the names out every time, it'd probably be less clear to my audience: they'd most likely have to reconstruct the familiar acronyms in their heads to follow what I was talking about.
The feeling of being an outsider because you don't know the acronym is just as real in non-public settings. The new guy on the team for example. There's a real feeling that you should already know it, even if it's the first time you've heard the other person say it. The first time you heard GBIF, did you know what it meant? How did you feel when you heard it?
Honestly? I looked it up on the glossary page of the company wiki and didn't feel much of anything about having to learn it.
At the time I didn't know what "Global Biodiversity Information Facility" referred to either, or why it was relevant to my team. Even without the acronym, I still would have had to go look it up or ask about it if someone used it with the expectation I was already familiar with it. I don't think the acronym had any significant effect on my experience of learning the concept.
yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.
Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...
That's why it's important to only use acronyms in their context, or provide the context when using them. And for goodness sake, expand them on the first use if you're audience is not already familiar with them! (and really, even if they are, it's just polite)
some of my favorite forum communities heavily rely on acronyms. but they also have a maintained gossary that introduces all the community/industry-specific acronyms. Acronyms help boost the density of the information conveyed
I think I've accumulated enough acronym cruft in my middling age where it has introduced serious imprecision in my language and understanding. Particularly when the recycling of acronyms is so common. PTP, P2P, PVP, NTP, LDAP, DNS, SMTP, B2B, CRM, SAP, SATA, IDE, PCI...at some point these terms stop meaning anything to me anymore and my eyes glaze rather than recollect context
I Have always found that acronyms are not the problem. They are necessary. However they become a problem when a lot of people start shoehorning them as attention targets instead of using them naturally in flow.
It's very similar to people that feel compelled to constantly name drop people and companies they've heard off that supposedly did some cool stuff that impressed them. A lot of the tech scene is people just blabbing at each other about who and what they've heard about.
All communication assumes prerequisite knowledge, if nothing more than that the listener or reader can hear or see and understands language at all. The top post on page one right now is "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter." I can't see that a single person complained, including me, that we're simply assumed to know what Fable, reMarkable, and Tom Riddle's diary are. Of those three, I only know Fable. Expanding an acronym or initialism will probably result in more people understanding the meaning but that seems far less true of software tech specifications than common public language. Non-techies probably aren't going to know what hypertext is or the difference between a markup language and any other language and may very well recognize http and html better than their expansions.
Strange how it doesn’t mention how acronym usage is cultural. Americans and their military love acronyms, and they are very liberal in their usage compared to other languages.
There are at least a couple posters here with a clear background as USMC or similar whose insightful comments on geopolitics read like a sitrep from CENTCOM and get routinely called out to expand their acronyms.
American cultural affectations tend to take over on the Internet, and you know you’re talking with one when they expect you to be familiar with stuff like ACA (Affordable Care Act) or SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States)
EDIT: spent 3 minutes on Reddit and they can’t stop going on about the USMNT. The only country to use an acronym for their football national team.
What's a sitrep?
What's USMC?
What's CENTCOM?
What's USMNT?
I wouldn't have to ask any of this were these expanded. Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms do nothing but to burden the reader for the sake of conveniencing the writer.
Yeah, well the frustration is the point of my comment.
I agree that acronyms can be overused, especially in marketing.
However, a big part of why Tech, software, computer science, etc. have a lot of acronyms is because there are a lot of new, often abstract things to name, and acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing. And I don't think anyone would really want to write out all of "hypertext transfer protocol" instead of http. And imagine if every url looked like "hypertext-transfer-protocol://world-wide-web.example.commercial/index.hypertext-text-markup-language". And if it had been given some other name, say "hyperprot" would that be any more meaningful than http?
Re: acronyms in English vs spanish.
I wonder if this is related to how human communication has a constant rate of information transfer. From what I understand, spanish is spoken faster, (more syllables per second) but has less information per syllable. One way that english is able to convey more information with less syllables is the use of acronyms and other abbreviations. And this is especially true for professional jargon that you use a lot to speak with colleagues at your job.
> You don’t see Kant writing TCI instead of “The Categorical Imperative” or Rousseau writing TSC instead of “The Social Contract”. You usually see the creation of concepts (Biopolitics by Foucault, Zeitgeist by Herder, Orientalism by Said) or the use of nominalization.
I don't think any of those terms are much better than acronyms. Maybe the name gives you a vague idea of what they refer to, but like many acronyms they are labels for complex ideas that you can't really understand just by knowing what it is called. And these terms can be, and are used for "in-group signalling" in much the same way as acronyms.
Finally, tech is not at all unique in its abundant use of acronyms. I don't know about in other languages but at least in English, Math, Physics, and astronomy also make heavy use of acronyms (ODE, PDE, QED, LCD, AGN, LASER, QCD, SI, CGS, AU, BEC, etc.) And from what I've observed medical and sales professionals also use a lot of acronyms.
when naming the protocol part of a url, obviously you don't want to pick something so verbose, but that doesn't mean you gotta pick an acronym. could be hyper:// or smth. not saying it should be, just saying there are other ways that a more verbose concept can be shorted for certain contexts
Exactly. If people HAVE to save space, an abbreviation is much clearer than an initialism.
Every day we stray further from gopher://
>I don't think any of those terms are much better than acronyms
The Social Contract is so much better, it is pithy and you can even sort of guess your way to what it means, it has resisted change over centuries, it far out performs an acronym.
The Categorical Imperative is abstract, badly descriptive and overly intellectual, much like most of Kant. The Categorical Imperative instead of something like Essential Moral Principle or anything that sort of pointed at what was meant is really a sort of acronym in words, you need to be an expert to know what it means.
This is why the Social Contract is a phrase used by common people in many languages, and the Categorical Imperative is used by Philosophers - generally only when discussing Kant specifically.
Really small comment to what you wrote, but that's one of the things that make me love English over my own native language (Spanish): the way you can build and combine words to describe a complex idea, in a way that you would need a full sentence in other languages like French or Spanish.
Information density in the English language is higher than in romance languages, and that's great for work.
I vastly prefer to write documentation in English.
I, on the other hand, still prefer more indulgently verbose languages when it comes to lyricism and entertainment. There's a charm to it.
> acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing
Convenience for the writer at the expense of the reader.
Convenience is no excuse to be unclear.
These names given to a thing may last for decades. Starting out naming them ambiguously is lazy and irresponsible.
I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.
Absolutely! I’ll dive into this a bit more in the second section, where even technical acronyms can be considered harmful because they are learned at a surface level and then spread at meme-like speed.
For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea. In CAP it’s about linearizability, while in ACID it’s about preserving invariants.
> For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea.
But wouldn't people still be unaware of the difference in meaning if the acronyms were spelled out? The word "consistency" appears in both names, with no indication that its meaning is context-dependent. I don't think you can lay the blame for this one at the feet of the acronyms.
Right. This whole argument is ridiculous.
absolutely. this is an illusion our mind believes.
There's also a power dynamic with which definitions take precedence.
You will always have to dumb it down for upper management. As soon as the acronyms come out, they will delay making decisions so that they don't have to take questions or be held accountable. If there is an acronym they use that's spelled the same way but means something totally different, you will have to avoid using yours even when it's the most appropriate term to avoid confusion.
My favorite example is ServiceNow using the term "CI" for "configuration item". You'll have to tell them in a lot more words what the deployment process is. :)
My pet peeve = authors who start using an acronym without ever "introducing" it. Suddenly there is an acronym used throughout an article, and one has to carefully go back and find the phrase to which it refers. Necessitated because the author was too lazy to introduce the acronym in parens after first using the phrase. Not sure how AI does this, but this problem predates AI by quite a bit.
YGTR!
My girlfriend does not throw rugs!
Ironically, you perform your own pet peeve here with ‘AI’ (Artificial Intelligence)
“Oh but everyone here knows what AI means,” you say, and yet that’s what the very authors you complain about said too.
I'll ask Andrew Ingram how he does it next time I see him.
Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms[1] will always come at the expense of the reader. Saying the reader should know what they mean, is a lazy and short sighted assumption of who's reading and when (today? decades from now?)
Then the question is: what's gained to justify burdening the reader with ambiguity?
Space? In which modern context is space really a problem?
Time? You're just costing the reader time in having think about the meaning and possibly having to look it up
I can't honestly think of any other supposed benefit to collapsing something explicit into something ambiguous. More often than not, the writer is being lazy, short sighted, and in some cases, irresponsible.
When see someone use a lot of these in their daily discourse, I worry about their naming discipline in their code as well.
[1]
Abbreviation: esp. for especially
Initialism: HTTP for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
Acronym: NASA (pronounced as a word) for National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
Acronyms I can handle. What I've always hated is aNz style compressions. a11y, a16z, stuff that you can't even guess at a decoding unless you know it already.
Yep, I've always thought they were f5g s4d.
Although that would make a cool number plate. Someone called Kate should get k8s c4r as her number plate. It would be an accurate description and also s4dly confusing.
If you don't understand anything I've written, you can catch my technical sales pitches here: https://t7ls3sp5s.com
My screen reader says "eleven why" for a11y. I hope that's fine with everyone
I kind of understand for i18n, but not for most other things
What could be the possible benefit of collapsing 'internationalization' to "i18n"? Which scarce resource (time? space?) was saved, in what context?
For example, I'll take "react-internationalization" over "react-i18n" for a package name any day.
Why obscure anything unless a clear problem was solved doing it, that warrants the ambiguity?
Imagine if Germans had invented this style. Great compressibility, but good luck dealing with a65z.
I don't have to guess because I'm smart enough to look things up.
P.S. The response is a ridiculous non sequitur -- I didn't say anything either for or against such terms, just that their meaning can be discerned.
But I would note that all of language requires all readers to be familiar with terms and their meanings. And specifically, if people aren't familiar with the notion of language-independent code then they aren't likely to understand what "internationalization" refers to, and if they are familiar with the topic then they almost certainly know what i18n means ... and the time and effort that it took to learn it is infinitesimal relative to all the other language and meanings that they have acquired.
Further, the whole argument from this person is intellectually dishonest nonsense. They claim that terms like HTTP and NASA are "at the expense of the reader", which is simply false. I and most other readers would far prefer to see these acronyms and initialisms than to have them spelled out every time. (And it would be a disaster if http were spelled out in URLs -- and it would be a disservice to the reader to spell that out.)
Yes, let's have each reader spend time and energy all day looking up abbreviations/acronyms/initialisms, so that the single writer can spend a little less time and energy in getting their own point across.
I think context and audience matter a lot. The post seems to mostly be talking about acronyms in the context of writing that's aimed at a public audience, but a lot of acronym use is aimed at a much more targeted audience.
For example, I work on a product that pulls data about plant species from various data sources. I'm not about to type "Global Registry of Introduced and Invasive Species" or "Global Biodiversity Information Facility" everywhere; everyone on my team, and pretty much anyone working in this problem space, knows them as "GRIIS" and "GBIF." If I wrote the names out every time, it'd probably be less clear to my audience: they'd most likely have to reconstruct the familiar acronyms in their heads to follow what I was talking about.
The feeling of being an outsider because you don't know the acronym is just as real in non-public settings. The new guy on the team for example. There's a real feeling that you should already know it, even if it's the first time you've heard the other person say it. The first time you heard GBIF, did you know what it meant? How did you feel when you heard it?
Honestly? I looked it up on the glossary page of the company wiki and didn't feel much of anything about having to learn it.
At the time I didn't know what "Global Biodiversity Information Facility" referred to either, or why it was relevant to my team. Even without the acronym, I still would have had to go look it up or ask about it if someone used it with the expectation I was already familiar with it. I don't think the acronym had any significant effect on my experience of learning the concept.
> I think context and audience matter a lot.
I believe people who use a lot of (unexpanded) abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms, are lazy in their thinking about context and audience anyway.
The audience can be an assumption, especially in posterity. The context of where the message/document is read, isn't set in stone either.
One thing that irks me quite a bit is when adjacent fields adopt the same acronym for different things
LoRa (RF tech) vs LORA (AI optimisation technique) GLM (statistics) vs GLM (AI model)
yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.
Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...
That's why it's important to only use acronyms in their context, or provide the context when using them. And for goodness sake, expand them on the first use if you're audience is not already familiar with them! (and really, even if they are, it's just polite)
Yeah, the TLA (three-letter acronym) space is vastly overcrowded and most TLAs are overloaded. This goes double for TLAs (two-letter acronyms). :P
some of my favorite forum communities heavily rely on acronyms. but they also have a maintained gossary that introduces all the community/industry-specific acronyms. Acronyms help boost the density of the information conveyed
It's also cheap shibboleth for communities - if you talk like we talk then you're one of us
I think I've accumulated enough acronym cruft in my middling age where it has introduced serious imprecision in my language and understanding. Particularly when the recycling of acronyms is so common. PTP, P2P, PVP, NTP, LDAP, DNS, SMTP, B2B, CRM, SAP, SATA, IDE, PCI...at some point these terms stop meaning anything to me anymore and my eyes glaze rather than recollect context
I Have always found that acronyms are not the problem. They are necessary. However they become a problem when a lot of people start shoehorning them as attention targets instead of using them naturally in flow.
Agree acronyms are often used to signal expertise and depth that isn’t really there, or even needed.
But I do think non serious acronyms should be still allowed: YAGNI, YAML, SNAFU, BHAG, GNU, etc.
It's very similar to people that feel compelled to constantly name drop people and companies they've heard off that supposedly did some cool stuff that impressed them. A lot of the tech scene is people just blabbing at each other about who and what they've heard about.
All communication assumes prerequisite knowledge, if nothing more than that the listener or reader can hear or see and understands language at all. The top post on page one right now is "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter." I can't see that a single person complained, including me, that we're simply assumed to know what Fable, reMarkable, and Tom Riddle's diary are. Of those three, I only know Fable. Expanding an acronym or initialism will probably result in more people understanding the meaning but that seems far less true of software tech specifications than common public language. Non-techies probably aren't going to know what hypertext is or the difference between a markup language and any other language and may very well recognize http and html better than their expansions.
Since we're talking about fatigue: weary*
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wary
Yes, I'm aware of the word wary; now look up "weary". Wary as in "beware" is different from weary as in tired. I see this mistake all the time...
My company has a strict NTLA policy.
That’s No Three-Letter Acronyms
Instead we do name things after animals like Lamprey, Remora, Whelk, Axolotl, Tick (the last has not been approved)
That seems worse to me.
You sound like team Axolotl, be more like Remora.
How do you find out if Tick has been approved? Is that a recursion project?
I enjoyed this article about AFSI.
I felt like it was just another WIWA rehash.
I was disappointed that KAOS was not an acronym.
IFHA
tl;dr