SOAP (STOP OVER-USING ACRONYMS PLEASE)

I go into this meeting. It’s work. It’s marketing.

It’s in California.

I’m pretty sure everybody’s speaking English and I’m not new to the business… but I don’t understand a thing.

I try harder. I pay more attention. Maybe I’m distracted.

When it seems I start grasping the meaning of the conversation again someone—maybe the CEO, the CFO, the COO or the IT, throws in a Cee-pee-Cee, U-Cee-Em, X-Y-Z… I’m lost again.

Americans are in love with Acronyms. We use them and abuse them with no mercy. Much more than any other people in this planet. Why?

I am no sociologist or linguist but my guts tell me it’s because of our very American, very practical nature. (VAVPN)

Acronyms, are used to abbreviate names of organizations and long or frequently referenced terms. Ok. That’s great. I understand there are some widely accepted acronyms that have become more words than acronyms; we all know of the CEO, it has come to represent the highest position in a company. Cool. But then came all the rest, we all want a titles we can initialize, the ECD, the CFO, the CD, the AD and the AE, the AS, and the IT…

By the way, I think the ECD has OCD or at least some form of ADD or ADHD because he has no patience to learn all this acronyms. Even syndromes and sickness have been granted their lengthy acronyms. And that’s another reason for Americans being acronym-crazy: We want to categorize and neatly divide everything. Where this all mania started?

Acronyms have been around since at least 1,500 years (the Hebrew word for the old testament (Tanakh) is an acronym) But Nobody knows for sure when we Americans fell in love with them (at least in my very superficial two-day research). What we know for sure is that they flourished during the great depression with the “alphabet agencies” created during the administration of president Roosevelt (FDR, of course).

There are some acronyms that don’t bother me. I even consider them funny. But those are mainly acronyms created to make fun of acronyms, or at least with enough irony to be acronym parodies. And those tend to come mainly from the military, like “FUBAR” (Fucked up beyond all recognition).

Some of these acronyms have made it into words and are sometimes used innocently without knowing the initial meaning behind them, like SNAFU. (As in a something went wrong, a mistake). SNAFU comes from the military also and it’s an acronym for “Situation normal, all fucked up”.

Interestingly, those two previous examples contain the mother, or father, or all acronyms. At least the most used, by far, in the English language. F-U-C-K.

The origin of that one is a mystery. There are as many theories as there are uses for the word (“For Unlawful Carnal knowledge”, “Fornication Under Carnal Knowledge”, “Fornication Under the King Consent” and many, many more attempts to decipher that one).

I don’t like most acronyms, I don’t share that need to initialize and categorize things. I hate them. I even considered joining an organization against acronyms (the Americans Association Against Acronyms)… but I decided not to when I discovered they called themselves the AAAA.