Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms

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• Hacker News
• 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
  by jterrys
• 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
  by fouc
• It's also cheap shibboleth for communities - if you talk like we talk then you're one of us
  by stirfish
• 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.

  by koreth1
• > 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.

  by jorisw
• 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?
  by forgotusername6
• 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.
  by nonameiguess
• 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
• 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...

  by niccl
• Yeah, the TLA (three-letter acronym) space is vastly overcrowded and most TLAs are overloaded. This goes double for TLAs (two-letter acronyms). :P
  by taneq
• 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)
  by stronglikedan
• 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
• 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

  by BLKNSLVR
• Imagine if Germans had invented this style. Great compressibility, but good luck dealing with a65z.
  by sph
• I kind of understand for i18n, but not for most other things
  by Valodim
• 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.)

  by jibal
• My screen reader says "eleven why" for a11y. I hope that's fine with everyone
  by hexasquid
• 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.
  by needSomeCoffee
• I'll ask Andrew Ingram how he does it next time I see him.
  by BLKNSLVR
• YGTR!
  by SoftTalker
• 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.

  by mock-possum
• 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
• 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.

  by jorisw
• It’s the first heading in the article. The first thing I wanted to convey.
  by DanielVZ
• 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.
  by collinmcnulty
• absolutely. this is an illusion our mind believes.
  by sreekanth67
• 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. :)

  by sublinear
• 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.

  by DanielVZ