Let's call the whole thing off

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, The AI Fix with Graham Cluey and Mark Stockley, and they were arguing over how to pronounce the acronym ASCII. Graham insisted the pronunciation is “Ass key” while Mark was a fan of “AH skee”. Since both are Brits, Graham’s preference is less offensive to those in the United Kingdom because the other sounds a lot like “ARSE Key”, referring to the buttocks.

This debate is similar to the controversy over the pronunciation of the term GIF. Some people pronounce it with a soft G, as in “jif”, while others who claim technical superiority use the hard G as in “gift”. This is not a small issue as I have seen friendships damaged and blows exchanged over this discrepancy.

I offer a compromise from the stylebooks used by almost every journalist in the English-speaking world.

When writing a news article, journalists are required to spell out an acronym on first use. For example, when referring to ASCII, a good journalist would write it this way, “American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)”, then, after that reference point, use ASCII for subsequent referrals to the standard. However, audio journalists are expected to spell out the acronym each time as in “A-S-C-I-I” AND “G-I-F”. This is a brilliant idea to resolve the debate.

Before you light the torches and sharpen the farm implements, there is a logic behind this.

Journalists write for the lowest common denominator. In this case, it means, writing for people who don’t know what the acronyms mean. I am writing this in a Silicon Valley coffee shop where multiple people are working on laptops, some coding software. I went up to a table on these technology entrepreneurs and asked them what ASCII and GIF stand for. None of them could answer with authority. They did say they understood the definition of the acronym but not what the letters represented. If I were writing an article for, say, a group of history teachers, I could not be sure if they would even know as much as the coders. For clarity and informational sake, spelling out the acronym is crucial.

Acronyms are a major part of language in the 21st century, along with the assumption that everyone knows what they stand for. The cybersecurity industry is rife with them and almost every one of the acronyms used have multiple translations. In context, a technologist might know the difference between them. Most people won’t. In my work in writing about technology, people I interview spout them as frequently as possible. While in the context of the discussion, I often have to stop them to clarify which translation they mean. Most of the time, they can’t easily answer what they mean. That always creates unnecessary ambiguity that must be clarified before the story is written.

My solution is not uncommon. Many multi-word terms are shortened by acronyms, but for a moment, what if we adopted the methodology of pronunciation for ASCII and GIF. That would mean…

• The United States (US) becomes “us”
• The former USSR (USSR) becomes “you sir”
• The United Kingdom (UK) becomes “yook”
• The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) becomes “see yah”

… and so on. While it might be amusing, it would also cause undo confusion.

Of course, as long as your audience understands what the heck you are talking about, it doesn’t matter whether it is “Ass Key” or “Arse Key”. People will always find something to be offended by and that’s on them. Maybe we should just get over ourselves and focus our energy and emotions on truly important issues like, “What’s for lunch?"