51–60 of 71 posts
My 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.
I agree that acronyms can be overused, especially in marketing. However, a big part of why Tech, software, computer science, etc. have a lot of acronyms is because there are a lot of new, often abstract things to name, and acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing. And I don't think anyone would really want to write out all of "hypertext transfer protoco…
when naming the protocol part of a url, obviously you don't want to pick something so verbose, but that doesn't mean you gotta pick an acronym. could be hyper:// or smth. not saying it should be, just saying there are other ways that a more verbose concept can be shorted for certain contexts
Then the question is: what's gained to justify burdening the reader with ambiguity?
Space? In which modern context is space really a problem?
Time? You're just costing the reader time in having think about the meaning and possibly having to look it up
I can't honestly think of any other supposed benefit to collapsing something explicit into something ambiguous. More often than not, the writer is being lazy, short sighted, and in some cases, irresponsible.
When see someone use a lot of these in their daily discourse, I worry about their naming discipline in their code as well.
[1]
Abbreviation: esp. for especially
Initialism: HTTP for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
Acronym: NASA (pronounced as a word) for National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
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.
I don't have to guess because I'm smart enough to look things up. P.S. The response is a ridiculous non sequitur -- I didn't say anything either for or against such terms, just that their meaning can be discerned. But I would note that all of language requires all readers to be familiar with terms and their meanings. And specifically, if people aren't familiar with the notion of language-independent code then they ar…
Strange 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 t…
What's a sitrep? What's USMC? What's CENTCOM? What's USMNT? I wouldn't have to ask any of this were these expanded. Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms do nothing but to burden the reader for the sake of conveniencing the writer.
I agree that acronyms can be overused, especially in marketing. However, a big part of why Tech, software, computer science, etc. have a lot of acronyms is because there are a lot of new, often abstract things to name, and acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing. And I don't think anyone would really want to write out all of "hypertext transfer protoco…
when naming the protocol part of a url, obviously you don't want to pick something so verbose, but that doesn't mean you gotta pick an acronym. could be hyper:// or smth. not saying it should be, just saying there are other ways that a more verbose concept can be shorted for certain contexts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wary
Yes, I'm aware of the word wary; now look up "weary". Wary as in "beware" is different from weary as in tired. I see this mistake all the time...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I'm aware of the word wary; now look up "weary". Wary as in "beware" is different from weary as in tired. I see this mistake all the time...
The author meant “wary”. You would never say “I’m weary of…”