I’ve been thinking a lot about acronyms lately.
I shun acronyms because for a brief time I worked for IBM, and the fact that the company name is an acronym should suggest how important they are to the executive leadership of the company. Although, to be fair, IBM is not an acronym, strictly speaking. Acronym has come to mean any series of letters which stand for something else.
An actual acronym is a new word created by assembling the initial letters of other words that connote some meaning to the speaker or writer, such as MADD or SNAFU. By the way it helps a lot if it’s meaningful to the audience as well. But all too often today something we call an acronym can’t be pronounced, and in my opinion is therefore not a word at all. Have you ever tried to pronounce the “word” IBM? Continue reading
