Acronyms

electricblue66 said:

I think the OP was actually on about the kinks behind various acronyms, not the use of acronyms in text, not tags either.

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... when everyone in the thread wanders off on their own tangent...

That giant corn cob is a pretty good conversation stimulator...

Requiax said:

That giant corn cob is a pretty good conversation stimulator...

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Exellent choice of words.

I think even KeithD's monster in 'Made to Fit' would struggle with this one.

BBC=Big Black Cock

BYC=Big Yellow Corn.

Now all you need is two very large orange Pumpkins. LOP, for short.

bbcbarry9033 said:

Anyway, every once in a while I come across a new acronym and I have to look it up. Today it was ENF, and I have to say, I like it.

What are some of the Literotic acronyms you guys like?

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But what if people, like myself, don’t want to go to the trouble of searching for what the abbreviation means? If I can’t understand what the writer is saying just by reading the comment then I ignore the comment, so what’s the point of him/her writing it in the first place.

If it’s in the body of a story it’s got to be something, such as GPS, which is readily understood by the reader. I don’t want to stop reading an interesting story to search for the meaning of something that the writer, an ASS or SAS, has put in to massage their ego.

I can't assume readers outside my proximity and affinity groups would have any idea what most acronyms and initialisms mean. I may assume familiarity with Nato and Fiat, and maybe IBM and FIFA and GPS, but most else are culture- or time- or locale-specific.

Does LA mean Los Angeles or Louisiana or LucasArts or Lawrence (or Lowell) Academy or Lebanese Army or Library Association or Linux Australia or Local Authority? You had better explain.

Hypoxia said:

I can't assume readers outside my proximity and affinity groups would have any idea what most acronyms and initialisms mean. I may assume familiarity with Nato and Fiat, and maybe IBM and FIFA and GPS, but most else are culture- or time- or locale-specific.

Does LA mean Los Angeles or Louisiana or LucasArts or Lawrence (or Lowell) Academy or Lebanese Army or Library Association or Linux Australia or Local Authority? You had better explain.

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I used to have a long string of letters after my name. Since I've retired I have dispensed with them (and stopped paying the membership fees!). But over the decades some of those letters have changed. They followed A for Associate; M for Member; or F for Fellow.

For example:
ANSO is a role I had when I started work. It had existed since the 1870s. Now only historians have any clue what it means. Even in my time it changed to another set of letters. I never got promoted to DNSO because it wasn't DNSO when I was promoted.
InstPS isn't that anymore. It changed its name in the 1990s.
RIPA went bankrupt. That was a shame. My father and my eldest uncle had had senior roles within it long before the bankruptcy.
SPOE changed and shortened.
My former position as Chairman, KRYHA is a role that no longer exists. That is true for my other old roles as Chairman, Vice-Chairman, Secretary, Vice-President etc.

For some of those professional letters I have no idea now what the latest incarnation uses to indicate levels of membership.

All of them would be meaningless except to other former members. And no one, not even me, gives a hoot. They are dead, defunct, no longer valid.

oggbashan said:

ANSO is a role I had when I started work. It had existed since the 1870s. Now only historians have any clue what it means. Even in my time it changed to another set of letters. I never got promoted to DNSO because...

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Hey, me too! I made Acting NSO before I left government - couldn't get the Gazettal because my peers were all at least ten years older than I was, and back then promotion was, guy at the top retires or dies, everyone shuffles up one notch. My next job was private enterprise, plain old "Manager".

electricblue66 said:

Hey, me too! I made Acting NSO before I left government - couldn't get the Gazettal because my peers were all at least ten years older than I was, and back then promotion was, guy at the top retires or dies, everyone shuffles up one notch. My next job was private enterprise, plain old "Manager".

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I left early to another larger non-defence department because defence staff numbers were shrinking. My father was an AVSO for D-Day 1944; he became an SVSO before he was promoted out of the department. What he was very proud of was at one point in his career his full address from anywhere in the world was VSO Gibraltar. His home address was [numeral] ONH Gibraltar.

I formerly had letters trailing my names but I accidentally slammed a car door on them and they fell off. Very painful.

Two ways of using acronyms and tech-talk, I think.

The first is as 'background'. For instance, if your story involves flying and for some reason a character or characters can hear what's going on, using the air traffic controller / pilot chatter might be useful. For instance (taken off the Net):

AAL2564 is flying from KBOI to KLAX - “American 2564, Boise Clearance, cleared to Los Angeles airport, Boise 3 Departure radar vectors to HYVAL then as filed, climb via SID, departure frequency 121.700, squawk 4021.”

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OK, for most of us that's meaningless jargon. (One of course trusts that it both pilots and ATC understand it.) My point is that it could be useful colour in a story, without the reader needing to understand it.

The second way is when it's part of the actual story. If your main characters are using acronyms or jargon in such a way that it directly influences the story line, then either they need to be really commonly-understood by the target audience (virtually everybody will understand 'CIA', 'med-evac', etc) or else they need to be explained somehow.

The 'target audience' is key. As an extreme example, articles written for Advanced Knitters' Quarterly are going to use a totally different vocabulary than those written for Fuel Dragster Monthly. Anybody buying a copy of one or the other can be assumed to understand what 'reverse stockinette stitch' or 'hemi-head' means. If such terms were necessary for a normal story line, they'd have to be explained.

Similarly, unless a given acronym is commonly understood, an author using it without explanation risks losing a large slice of potential readers.

Hypoxia said:

I formerly had letters trailing my names but I accidentally slammed a car door on them and they fell off. Very painful.

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I removed mine painlessly and profitably by resigning and/or declining to renew subscriptions when they were no longer relevant. In some way they were a history of my various career paths and useless once I finally retired.