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.
My screen reader says "eleven why" for a11y. I hope that's fine with everyone
Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#32Since we're talking about fatigue: weary*
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#33My company has a strict NTLA policy. That’s No Three-Letter Acronyms Instead we do name things after animals like Lamprey, Remora, Whelk, Axolotl, Tick (the last has not been approved)
How do you find out if Tick has been approved? Is that a recursion project?
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#34My 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.
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.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#35Strange 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.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#36Acronyms 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.
I kind of understand for i18n, but not for most other things
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#37I 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.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#38Acronyms 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.
Imagine if Germans had invented this style. Great compressibility, but good luck dealing with a65z.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#39I 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.
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.
> For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea.
But wouldn't people still be unaware of the difference in meaning if the acronyms were spelled out? The word "consistency" appears in both names, with no indication that its meaning is context-dependent. I don't think you can lay the blame for this one at the feet of the acronyms.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#40I 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 In…
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?