Discussion summary
A discussion on acronym fatigue highlights concerns about overuse and clarity, with some advocating for avoiding three-letter acronyms. Participants mention policies against acronyms and the use of animal names instead.
What the discussion says
- Acronyms can signal expertise but may obscure meaning.
- Some companies avoid three-letter acronyms entirely.
- Non-serious acronyms like YAGNI or GNU are still acceptable.
“Acronyms often signal expertise that isn’t really there.”
“My company has a strict NTLA policy—No Three-Letter Acronyms.”
Comments
Hacker News
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)
by lmpdev
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)
by jorisw
Better an acronym than changing nouns.
For example, I work in hospitality bookkeeping/accounting. Back in 2018 on a call with Chowly I learned Third-Party Online Ordering (TOOS) to refer to the then growing list of companies such as Caviar, Grubhub, DoorDash, etc.
Meanwhile I continued to hear from colleagues a variety of descriptive nouns such as, delivery platform, third-party delivery, delivery apps.
Which was OK, until the market diversified and actual delivery companies appeared, Relay chief among them.
So when someone spoke of delivery-something the question was are you talking about food ordering or food delivery platform?
Funny, but a controlled vocabulary goes with bookkeeping like peas with carrots.
As an aside, i have to spend some time on the phone with vendors and got tired of the dogs breakfast of words used to spell out a serial number or email, Irving-Boy-Momma, Ice-Ball-Monday, and other endless variations. Now I’m Nato compliant, haha. India-Bravo-Mike.
by xtiansimon
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.
by zjp
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.
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.
by sph
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.
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.
by thayne
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- Hacker News
- 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)
by lmpdev - 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)
by jorisw - Better an acronym than changing nouns.
For example, I work in hospitality bookkeeping/accounting. Back in 2018 on a call with Chowly I learned Third-Party Online Ordering (TOOS) to refer to the then growing list of companies such as Caviar, Grubhub, DoorDash, etc.
Meanwhile I continued to hear from colleagues a variety of descriptive nouns such as, delivery platform, third-party delivery, delivery apps.
Which was OK, until the market diversified and actual delivery companies appeared, Relay chief among them.
So when someone spoke of delivery-something the question was are you talking about food ordering or food delivery platform?
Funny, but a controlled vocabulary goes with bookkeeping like peas with carrots.
As an aside, i have to spend some time on the phone with vendors and got tired of the dogs breakfast of words used to spell out a serial number or email, Irving-Boy-Momma, Ice-Ball-Monday, and other endless variations. Now I’m Nato compliant, haha. India-Bravo-Mike.
by xtiansimon - 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.by zjp
- 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.
- 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.
by sph - 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.
- 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.
by thayne