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.
Mtg. A lot of posts and articles use it for Marjory Taylor Green an it always confuses me, I keep trying to figure out what Magic the Gathering has to do with Jewish space lasers.
As a kid, I was in the room at one point while my mom was watching some TV show, maybe law and order or something similar. I heard somebody letting somebody else know (verbally) the details of some victim and described the cause of injury or death or whatever as "GSW". I asked my mom what GSW meant. She said "gun shot wound". I said that that couldn't possibly be right, and she was curious why. I said because "gun shot wound" is 3 syllables and "GSW" is 5; it's literally quicker to say the full thing.
So yeah, GSW is fucking stupid when said aloud, and even me as a dumbass child knew that.
"Dubya" is one syllable, maybe two depending on your particular accent
Edit: Unfortunately I was extremely stoned at the time of this message and that should have been "[...] two syllables, maybe one depending [...]" but I'm leaving it up as evidence of my dumbshittery since it spawned discussion. Don't do drugs kids
POS I find very funny as I'm often working on Point-of-Sale equipment, and most of it is running Poorly Optimized Software, making the whole thing a Piece of Shit for the users.
Reminds me of when the Department of Health and Human Services in our local state government restructured. They formed a secondary department, which they've named the Department of Families, Fairness, and Services (DFFS) very, very briefly before becoming the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, because it only took 5 minutes before we all started calling them "The department for fucks sake"
They hadn't even made any public announcements, it was all just internal vendor notifications, but I kept the emails for a chuckle.
Just to be “that guy” I wanted to say that an acronym is technically an initialism that you pronounce as a word, like SCUBA, LASER, or NASA. If it’s just letters that stand for something, it’s called an initialism. No one cares (not even me), but I had to say it :P
Most acronyms that have a W in them are pointless to say aloud in English. It’s almost always shorter to just say the words. Like WTF, for example. Those are my least favorite
Oh and YMMV. I used to work with car data and we would use YMMB to mean “year/make/model/body” and so I always start reading YMMV wrong and that bugs me
(IANAL is my favorite ever acronym because it's funny dammit... I was just looking for an excuse to sneak it in somewhere in this thread. RTFM is a fine acronym but I have such a negative association with it because it's almost exclusively used by assholes. PEBKAC is just an elitist acronym whenever not used ironically.)
Totally agree on RTFM, I almost exclusively see it used by people who really need to put you down to feel adequate. Same thing with the assholes who answer a question with a LMGTFY (let me Google that for you) link, who think they’re clever but have entirely missed the point of asking for input from actual humans.
I don’t know PEBKAC and I’m kind of afraid to look it up.
A cool turn on that one is by the Arch Linux Wiki, which calls it Read The FINE Manual. Owning to the fact that this particular wiki is quite excellent. I use Arch BTW.
But my favourite is WYSIWYG has been mine for 20 years now, it’s so fun to say.
It stands for “What You See Is What You Get” and was used for visual editing programs where you could move things around and the final product would reflect that.
For those who don't know, much of the reason WYSIWYG is so fun is because the accepted pronunciation is "whizzy-wig"!
As a term it rarely gets used any longer, because "visual editors" are now the norm, where once they were the rarity.
Before visual editors, you'd have content on a screen like a document which you could only see how it would actually look by physically printing it onto a piece of paper. This is because the printer itself knew about fonts and paper size and all that, and the editor didn't.
Nowadays even with technically non-WYSIWYG editors like markdown text you can still instantly preview the rendered output on screen, so there isn't as much need to call it out as a feature.
WYSIWYG is also pretty common these days for tabletop gaming, with regard for models using the rules for whatever weapons or equipment they are actually holding. This came around as often people build the model one way (e.g. with a machine gun) before a rule change, after which they want to use the better rules without re-doing the model (e.g. with a flamethrower).
There's also WYGIWYW ("What You Get Is What You Want") and is primarily used for latex, because you give up some manual control for a (allegedly) better looking result.
Another real acronym with a funny story (maybe only to old geeks like me) is STONITH.
Back when "high availability" meant two servers with shared storage and a "heartbeat" network connection, if one of the servers failed, the second one would notice there was no more heartbeat from the first and pick up the traffic so users would never know.
However, if the servers lost the network connection, there'd be no way to tell if the other server was still running and if both continued accessing the shared storage, they could corrupt the application data. So each server could take over if it noticed the other wasn't available by executing STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head) basically sending a power down signal to the PDU, making sure the other node couldn't corrupt data.
Norway has a weird obsession with making translated acronyms for well established terms. Lately, after many years of use of "AI", the Language Council decided that the term should be changed to "KI", as that is the "correct" Norwegian acronym. Not only does it feel wrong to say, but it invades another local acronym for me.
To top it of, that council decided to make "KI-generated" the "word of the year", which seems like a pat on their own shoulder to brilliantly making the acronym.
In Czech we had/have this too. I haven't heard it in years now so maybe it's finally gone, but when Morpheus tells Neo about the first "UI" (umělá inteligence = artificial intelligence).
Similarly, GDPR is referred to as DSGVO in Germany, based on the German name of the legislation. Same legislation, just a different name in one country because they didn't want to use an English acronym.
We have the same with EEA (european economic area, that part of EU which norway is a part of). It's EØS here. It makes it convoluted to discuss, especially since EEA is mainly brought up in international subjects. And the actual words behind the acronym is never brought up, so the acronym serves mainly as a name, making the differentiation even more useless.
It's a bit of a mix. I think people generally say AI, but every source which aims at using Norwegian in a formally correct way are starting to adopt KI. Many radio hosts seem frustrated, as they are suddenly required by the producer to switch up an acronym they have been using for several years.
FTW. For years I thought it meant "Fuck The What". Even now that's the first thing that comes to mind and have a hard time remembering the actual meaning.
I've been told what it means yet every time I see it my brain goes "for the...." and I can't figure out the last 2 letters. And I have to look it up to be reminded that it means "fixed that for you". But every time I forget and I have to look it up again.
Dated someone with FTW tattoo. I always thought it was Fuck the World but he sweaaaars he meant it as “Forever Two Wheels”, some motorcycle thing. Yeh right bud.
If anyone can come up with a word that starts with GIF that uses the J sound I'd be happy to learn what it is, but all the GIF words I can think of use the G sound.
Their original product was called SEQUEL. Structured English Query Language. They got sued by a company called sequel so changed it to SQL, but everybody still calls it sequel.
Someone had recently named their newly minted GUI toolkit as "gooey". I was thinking of trying to talk them out of it because imagine the confusing conversations. Then I thought more about my decision and decided to spend my time on more productive tasks.
Same. All through school and in University, lecturers and professors called it G.U.I., then when I entered the workforce, managers were saying "gooey", I was so confused, I didn't know what they meant and I couldn't take them seriously when they said it.
Now 15 years later, I still cringe when people say "gooey", I deliberately make an effort to say "G.U.I." in an effort to correct them.
I don't really like it when people use acronyms when talking about music albums, it always takes me far too long to figure out what they actually mean.
I've seen speculation (though I don't currently have a source available) that "out of pocket" in that sense is intended to reflect that the subject is uncontrollable or not manageable. Which actually originally surprised me because it implies a connection between "out of pocket" (in the sense of unavailable) and "in the pocket" (as in, controlled by or heavily influenced by an outside entity; "that politician is in the pocket of Big Oil").
I also have this sneaking suspicion in the back of my mind that I've heard "out of pocket" used in a film, maybe by a spy or secret service agent referring to a VIP not being where they're supposed to be, but that's also something I don't have links about. It would fit in with the above concept, though.
So maybe the middle managers who use that shorthand are trying to sound like loose cannons and suave people of intrigue, when really they're just dropping off their dry cleaning or something similarly mundane? "You can't control me during this time, I'll be at my 7-year-old's ballet recital!"
Someone at work insisted the MVP emoji meant Minimum Viable Product. I get that the term exists, and that we use it, but it's way more niche than Most Valuable Player, and it's certainly no emoji.
It's in contrast to something like LaTex or markdown, where you edit the syntax for formatting directly and don't see the final result until you preview or save it.
Then there's the less talked about sibling, WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean). These attempt to reduce bloat in output by being more abstract in what they manipulate instead of promising pixel-perfect results.
I spend so much time in trans spaces online that it took me a second to realize you weren't being an ass to people who've had FFS (facial feminization surgery)
After 20 years in EMS, (see how it starts immediately - Emergency Medical Services), The whole bloody damned field is nothing but acronyms for as far as the eye can see.
From BPM - Beats per minute, to ABC - Airway, Breathing, circulation, (which today is more like ACB - Airway, Circulation, Breathing) to OPQRST - Onset, provoke/pallation, Quality, Region/Radiation, Severity, Time to A-Fib - Atrial Fibrillation to SOB - Shortness of Breath.
NAMBLA. Those chuckle fucks at the North American Man/Boy Love Association really made it difficult for us members of the North American Marlon Brando Look-Alikes.
i18n I know it's not technically an acronym but what a fucking obscure way to write a word that's going to be constantly around non-english speakers. All the other ones in this family are also quite obnoxious but i18n is especially awful.
I learned about a11y like a year ago, and thought it was 1337 speak for ally until I looked it up, and only then (like 20 years after first seeing it) did I realize what i18n meant.
Internationalization, basically making your thing accessible in other languages and cultural customs (like twelve and a half being 12,5 and anything related to fucking dates).
I agree, very weird. I thought i18n was some weird sound thing that I hadn't figured out yet. "'eye-eighteen-ehn' isn't too far from 'internationalization', I guess"
Not an acronym, but I've been in a couple of jobs where people use "offline" to mean "not at this meeting", as in "let's take this tangential discussion offline". They would say that during an in-person meeting to take the conversation to digital (online!) media!
Not me but my spouse hates recursive ones, like GNU. Hates them so much, active vocal expressions of dislike. Anyways the setting I'm making is filthy with recursive acronyms for no reason.
YWNBAM/YWNBAW. Besides being transphobic (it's short for 'you will never be a man/woman'), I always automatically attempt to read/pronounce acronyms as if they were words, and this one sounds really stupid.
I have a weird thing where I'll know an acronym that's close to another one, confuse the two, and come up with a new acronym that doesn't exist or make sense, but it "works" and then the rest of the context is just off.
The latest victim of this is "Assigned Cis At Birth"
Now that that's out in the world, I'm sorry that someone else is going to do the same thing...
Like all of them, I never remember what they mean and there are some people at work who love to use em. It just makes meetings take longer and emails become less legible.
I hate LFG because gamers can't agree on how to spell it or what it means... Sometimes it's spelled LFP, LFF or LFM... And sometimes it means "Looking for Guild".
Isnt LFM looking for member? Like if you have part of a group already together and just need a healer lets say. I'd say its different than LFG which in my mind is a player looking for a group
It does sometimes mean that though it's more common to see it as just trying to assemble a group. If you're looking for more you'll usually use something like LF1M, LF2M etc...
One that always confuses me is MSM. For over 40 years it has been used to mean "Men who have sex with men", but recently conservatives started using it to mean "mainstream media" and its sometimes hard to tell which of their hates they are talking about. MSM is still widely used in the medical community when discussing/classifying patients and in the ongoing AIDS epidemic.
Saving a few decieconds is the most upside they can possibly have.
Potential downsides: the reader has no comprehension, has to spend several full seconds or minutes asking the meaning, has to spend extra time mentally processing the text cos it's coded.
I remember watching a video by Ryan Higa thinking it meant "stop tickling furry unicorns", it wasn't until I learned what it actually meant years later that I got pretty damn disappointed.
VOD is a close second though. I hate how you could take something that refers to something so general (videos on demand), and over time starr using it to exclusively refer to past Twitch streams. I know that this is what Twitch calls them, and it's technically not wrong to call them that, but it still doesn't make sense when that's all that VOD means nowadays. I miss the days of being jealous at the Americans for having cable.
Either FR or PFP. "FR" just feels like another filler word. PFP... I'm too used to calling them "avatars", it just feels wrong and superfluous. I'm probably aging myself here.
Might be unpopular, but as a non-English native I hate that Americans need to abbreviate everything into acronyms. POSTUS, SCOTUS, AWOL, ASAP. If it's not catchy as an abbreviation it needs a new name. I don't mind it so much in small settings, but when you read anything about America and all the comments are full of acronyms it's like a puzzle I never asked for.
Mine are "lol" and "lmao". I get what they originally meant, and I get why most people use them nowadays. It's just that they often signal "I have nothing to contribute, but still expect people to read my crap".
As a second (third?) place, "WYSIWYG". If you're going to coin such verbose acronym, might as well sub it with an actual word, like, dunno, "transparent".
EDIT - "lol" = "lots of laughs", "lmao" = "laughing my arse off", "WYSIWYG" = "what you see is what you get".
EDIT2: as another poster correctly pointed out, "lol" also originally meant "laughing out loud". Perhaps even more than "lots of laughs".
Wiktionary lists both "laughing out loud" and "lots of laughs". Nowadays though it's neither; on a pragmatic level it doesn't convey "I'm laughing" / "I laughed", it conveys amusement and/or lack of seriousness, depending on the context.
[Alice] The Sun is a star.
[Bob] yeah sure the sun only appears at night lol (implying: "I'm amused at what Alice said, and I don't take it seriously.")
I don't even recall pronouncing it in loud voice. In English I simply say "what you see is what you get", and in Portuguese or Italian I rephrase it. (Although I remember at least one person calling it ['vizi 'vige] in Portuguese. And I was, like... "what?")