I hate it when people invent acronyms. FFS.

ARC.

You may remember the old story about a mother who commented "LOL" in an SMS when hearing news of somebody's death.

She thought it meant "lots of love."

A social media listening company reported that in 2023, in the US, there were more than 800,000 searches a month for "SMH" which makes it the most searched acronym.

SMH.

And I remember hearing - way back in about 2006 - that "FTW" meant "Fu&k the world."

It still reads that way, to me at least.

Acronyms and abbreviations are everywhere. Governments and militaries seem to love them.

I remember, as a kid, watching a Vietnam war movie, snickering when I figured out what FUBAR meant.

There must be hundreds of others from the military, but the more common ones are DOA, AWOL, and of course SNAFU.

Governments around the world seem to love them.

But not surprisingly, they have their origins in more practical circles - journalism and telegrams.

POTUS is said to have been invented by Walter Phillips, who was the Washington bureau chief for the AP (that's Associated Press).

Previously, he was a journalist and most notably, a telegraph operator.

Mr. Phillips developed code to make legal reporting faster, but also made sense for space-constrained telegrams, the Twitter of the 19th century.

I mean the X of the 19th century, whatever that stands for.

At the time, his shorthand had a real purpose, and that was space.

It looked like SMS from the 2010s. This example was printed in the Kansas City Star a century earlier (1910):

T trl o HKT ft mu o SW on Mu roof garden, nw in pg...

The recipient knew to transcribe this as, “The trial of Harry K Thaw for the murder of Stanford White on the Madison Square Roof Garden, now in progress ...”

Back then, they said those phrases were "skeletonized."

Refer to this quote from the Birmingham Age-Herald in Alabama on 14 Apr. 1895:

In addition the more frequent phrases are skeletonized to the limit of safety. “Scotus” is “supreme court of the United States;” “potus,” “president of the United States.”

Apparently, the word acronym is much more recent - 1940.

That's when it first appeared in an English translation of a novel by Lion Feuchtwanger.

FWIW, acronyms are said to be pronounceable words made from initials of another term, like NATO or even scuba (which is now widely accepted in all lowercase, as a word in its own right!)

Abbreviations are more like a set of initials, BTW.

Linguists would use a wider term, initialism, specifying that this is what you should call anything that is formed by initials regardless of pronunciation, AFAIK.

And while this type of shorthand may have its origins in the US, I would say initialisms prevail even more here in Singapore - sorry - SG.

Anybody who has lived here for more than 10 minutes will recognize HDB, PUB, CTE, COE, CPF, CCB, MRT, and dozens more.

KNN. There are just so many to learn.

And I'm OK with them since they're so commonly used, and they do make things simpler.

The problem I have is when people take their own liberties to invent new ones.

WTF do people think they are doing by coining their own?

I sometimes wonder if it’s done to show exclusivity or to make it look like they are part of a special, in-the-know group.

Or maybe they want to sound like experts.

Wrose, they could be trying to obfuscate what they are saying, hiding behind cryptic capital letters, fully knowing you won't understand them.

They might figure if they can complicate things, they can sound more like experts.

But it's inconsiderate and even rude, IMHO.

People may not want to ask you what you mean by SXIPLEM.

(Don't ask, I just made that up.)

They'll feel stupid.

Other times, people may not use them to deliberately confuse, but more out of laziness.

I’ve been in countless meetings where people presenting use internal jargon, entirely confusing the audience and failing to get their point across.

Sometimes, it’s innocent enough. A web developer talking about CSS may think he’s speaking plain English, but a client may not get it.

A user experience professional referring to a CTA may think such lingo is known by all, but the client will probably end up clueless.

Trying to tell a client not to worry because their site has a WAF and CDN will probably actually make them worry because they can't follow what you're saying.

The problem is that each of these experts uses those acronyms so often that they’ve become common parts of their daily lexicon.

They’re just not thinking on behalf of their audiences.

And usually, the audience is too shy to ask what they mean.

I bet you could invent nonsensical acronyms and use them liberally and nobody would ever challenge you.

So, go ahead and use them all you want, especially if they’re commonly known, but if your audience doesn’t get them, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

IDGAF.

Because I’m sure you were confused when you read "ARC" (Acronyms Really Confuse) at the beginning of this article.

OK, that was lame AF.

GTG.