What is your least favourite acronym?

thatsTheCatch@lemmy.nz to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 358 points –

Mine is OOO for Out Of Office. I always misread it in my head like a ghost and it takes me a few seconds to process. It also doesn't translate to speech—you have to say the whole thing.

Interested to see if others have similar acronyms they beef with.

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Not an acronym though, but an initialism. Acronyms are said like a word, like CRISPR, initialisms aren’t, like ATM.

you're being pointlessly pedantic. Initialisms are also considered acronyms by most defimitions and by common use.

I don't think they're being pointlessly pedantic. I've been around POS systems and some people call it by the letters, P.O.S. & others by the acronym, sounding like "pause". Nobody assumes you're talking about a Piece of Shit when you say "pause". Also for OOO ("oooh") vs O.O.O., which doesn't roll off the tongue, but you don't sound like Casper.

Now, being pointlessly pedantic, I find it interesting to think that if we continue to use the word acronym for initialisms, then the word acronym will actually be initialisms! English is weird!

Yeah when you say “pause” they assume you’re referring to a position.

im not saying theres no difference between pronouncing each lettwer and pronouncing the whole thing like a word, just that both are generally considered acronymns so the correction was unnecessary.

Oh shit. TIL. Also, I guess TIL is not an acronym then lol.

Speaking of ATM, am I the only one that defaults this to "ass to mouth", before realizing they mean asynchronous transaction machine?

Hmmm, interesting. I don't know if I've ever heard anyone say "TIL" out loud. When I read it, I say it as an acronym ("till") in my head, but I think if I ever said it out loud, I'd probably go with the initialism ("tee-eye-ell"). All that to say, maybe it's both?

I always pronounce all initialisms as words if even close to possible. I don't care whether or not they were meant to. Till, fuhtfy, fuhmmuhl, wuhtf, and so on. Some I understand why others might say as individual letters, but others I have no clue because it doesn't make sense to me at all. Why would you ever say double-u tee eff, which is two syllables longer than the actual words?