Human beings may or may not be the only creatures on the planet who use language. But this much is a sure bet: Humans are the only living beings on the planet who use acroynms, and usually they use acronyms to excess.
Admit it, you aren’t sure what an acronym is, are you? Simply put, it’s a word that has been created from the initial letters of other words. Examples would be NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and ZIP (Zonal Improvement Plan) Code.
But acronyms are far more and better than that, because some people — especially people at large corporations and government bureaucracies — love to create acronyms from virtually everything. What are some of your favorites? What acronyms are unique to your life, your company and way of doing business?
The government has given us FBI, CIA, BLM, TSA, HSA, USDA, FDA, ATC, and the list goes on.
In the business world you have such tongue twisters, like business performance management software, for example, that they sometimes defy acronyms — yet other business acronyms are so obvious they become a trademarked company name and we rarely use the real or “full” company name they represent: HP, for example, or IBM. (I once worked for a company doing business for HP and discovered that the HP people love acronyms so much that they invent them faster than our trainers could understand and teach them.)
The military, too, is loaded with slang that started as acronyms. Classic case in point: FUBAR. For the sake of keeping this blog PG rated, I’ll express that one as “Fouled Up Beyond All Repair,” but the military people reading this know what “Fouled UP” REALLY is in the expression.
Share your favorites with us. Tell us the acronyms you find most useful, or the ones you find especially clever, those that make you laugh, or especially the ones that irritate you.
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