Acronym overload

Okay, there is an online dictionary of acronyms, and “initialisms” which boasts a database of over 410,000 entries. By the way, I am here to tell you that 290,000 of them were forged right here in Vernal, Utah. The web site’s tag line says that it “exists purely to unravel the bewildering range of acronyms that impact daily life.” So why do acronyms exist? Isn’t that a little like regression?

We hear the “lack of real communication” buzzwords all the time. There are whole books and whole college courses teaching us how to communicate. Many of the world's ills are traced to poor communication skills. Whatever the communication culprits in modern life are, I nominate acronyms as one of them.

We shorten the name of a title by using its initials, and then we need a whole new realm of word classification to catalogue and decipher the acronyms. It’s like speaking two languages when one should do.

If you are going to really understand what you are talking about when you use acronyms, you still have to know what they stand for. So your brain has to learn two symbols for the same thing, the actual words with their meanings and the acronym. I know, it gets kind of foggy here, but it gets worse.

I am assuming that acronyms have come into popular usage because they save time in speaking or space in writing. For me they do neither. I will usually have to spend extra time dredging up the acronym (is it JC or CJ?) which I will still probably mistake and have to explain anyway, and in the case of typing it, I will have to engage the Caps Lock key which I will forget to release and thereby necessitate retyping the following sentence anyway. So much for saving time. As for saving space—in the interest of clarity, let’s apply the Cadillac mentality. Bigger just might be better, as you will see. “What is the point of speed if you lose accuracy,” as my life skills coach and type teacher used to say.

Because they feel like real words, I don’t object as much to the kind of initial letter acronyms that can actually be pronounced as a word like NATO, radar (radio detecting and ranging), or wimp (weakly interacting massive particle)—never mind, I wouldn’t be using that one anyway.

But take USB for instance. Every computer user knows that USB ports are incredible. But don’t even try pronouncing that one as a word. You will be laughed right out of the computer lab—or the medical lab (ultrasound-guided aspiration biopsy), or off the soccer field (unsporting behavior), or out of Iowa (United Soybean Board) or out of the US Bank.

One of my favorite adages is “words mean something,” which indicates that some of us are having trouble communicating using words. The trouble with acronyms is that they mean less because they symbolize more. Just so you know, ACRONYM is the official acronym for “abbreviated code rarely or never yielding meaning,” according to thefreedictionary.com and seconded by Bertha.

Raise your hand if you knew that USB means “universal serial bus.” Lacking that bit of knowledge could cause you to mix the letters of your acronym and come up with SBU (small byte utility), or SUB (synchronized uploading bridge) which are both probably some kind of geek speak, but not the one you want right now. Worse yet, you may be lacking any set of words to initialize in your head and be forced to come up with “that computer port where you plug in your little device that holds files (portable memory storage or PMS). See what I mean?

Just be careful if you use are using your laptop at a Des Moines soccer match to make a loan payment. Things could get a little messy.