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.
I hate all acronyms that aren’t defined.
You see it constantly in gaming communities. Ah, yes, the game “AC.” You know the one.
Assassin’s Creed? Animal Crossing? Armored Core? Ace Combat?
Armor class…
Air Conditioning
That one’s cool.
I love that game !
It’s the Air Charlie
Autocannon
You know tf2? The beloved multiplayer game with great lore that still got hundreds of thousands of players more than a decade after its release even though the devs mostly abandoned it and it got overrun by bots? No, the other one.
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.
Tap to deal 5 damage to target creature or player, then add three recharge counters to Jewish Space Laser.
During the untap phase, if there are any recharge counters on Jewish Space Laser, instead of untapping remove one counter. Otherwise, untap as normal.
I haven’t played Magic in 25 (maybe 30?) years, but you captured the tone for sure. Do you work for Wizards?
I keep trying to figure out what Magic the Gathering has to do with Jewish space lasers.
tbf, it wouldn’t surprise me if those show up in a set at some point
Yes! Imagine not being American, and Magic is the only thing you could ever associate MTG with.
Ftfy always becomes “fuck that, fuck you” in my head.
It doesn’t change much apart from the aggression
Even that hadn’t changed much.
Wow, I like that better…I feel that’s what the person really means most of the time
A lot of people on Reddit used to unironically claim that’s what it stood for. 🤦
Had an old colleague who kept abbreviating ‘follow up’ as ‘f/up.’
“Yeah we should be okay, I’ll f/up on that later today.”
“Hey are you able to f/up on this?”
“Hey, I f/uped with our boss today on our issue.”
That is an… unwise abbreviation
I learned this as medical short hand back before electronic medical records were everywhere. Except I used f/u instead of f/up. This phrase went in almost every single case note every day so I used the short hand A LOT. It still sneaks into my writing sometimes.
I always read “f/u w/PCP” as “fucked up on PCP” instead of “follow up with primary care provider”.
I’m going to answer the opposite question. My favorite acronym is TLA (three letter acronym)because it mocks the whole system.
I also love OOO specifically because it is ghosty.
Valid!
There’s an RFC for TLAs: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5513
TLA is “The Last Airbender” for me
Similarly, one I heard today is “TMA” - too many acronyms
See, my favorite is GNU, for “GNU’s Not Unix”.
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
Today I learned that laser is an acronym. “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”
Radar and sonar are both acronyms as well.
Initialisms are a type of acronym. All initialisms are acronyms but not all acronyms are initialisms.
Other way around.
Sometimes, initialism or alphabetism is used to refer to acronyms formed from the string of initials which are usually pronounced as individual letters
Hmm, okay, it’s apparently debated. However, the only way I’ve learned it is that initialisms are words formed from initial letters of included words, and acronyms are initialisms pronounced as words. It seems like it varies by country as well.
I think it makes logical sense that acronyms are initialisms, since initialism just implies that it’s formed from the initials, thus all abbreviations formed from the initials of the words are initialisms, while a subset of those can be pronounced as a word and thus can be called acronyms. Personally I think it’s very important that things are named such that one can logically deduce their origin and meaning.
I care, but mostly because it’s fun. Just like apparently there’s no such thing as a fish, and that fruits are vegetables…
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.
Absolute freak show of an organisation. (Theirs, not yours.) The first time I read about it I thought it was onion-level satire but, sadly, it wasn’t…
I too thought it was a South Park joke at first.
Is… is that a pedophile advocacy group?
The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is a pedophilia and pederasty advocacy organization in the United States. It works to abolish age-of-consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors[2][3] and campaigns for the release of men who have been jailed for sexual contacts with minors that did not involve what it considers coercion.
North American Man/Boy Love Association is very pedophilia focused and they should be disbanded.
Yeah, that was about what I thought it was…
Same with the attempt to make people call pedophiles "MAP"s instead. (For those who haven’t been made aware of the abbreviation; it is meant to stand for “Minor Attracted Person”. While it’s a more broad term than pedophile, since it includes the other age ranges (Something like hebephile and such, I don’t remember them all, learned about it from a joke a comedian told), for normal conversations I think pedophile works fine for talking about everyone attracted to people below a certain age of which we (society) deem them capable of consenting to some things)
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.
I hate it.
KI-generated
A Kamehameha is also KI-generated.
Killer Instinct-generated.
I take it the Language Council serves a similar role to the Spanish or French Academy of Language, and that it takes a prescriptive attitude, correct?
im glad that english prescriptivism is mainly just a social thing tbh
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.
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).
did it catch on with the public, or do they still say AI?
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.
word of the year lol smh
Don’t have a least favourite.
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.
I always read ofc as “of fucking course” it makes no sense to include the f.
“ofc” doesn’t stand for “of fucking course”
edit this was supposed to have a question mark:
“ofc” doesn’t stand for “of fucking course”?
Exactly!
Well that’s the whole point, ain’t it?
This reminds me of OOF: Out of Office. Like with automated email replies.
Shouldn’t it be OOO? But nope, it’s OOF.
Oc is already taken for original content
Wow I always just assumed I was the only one who did this! Greetings, fellow of fucking course’er.
OC is already original content though. Not that I like OFC but OC is already taken in my head.
i read it as literally ‘of c-’. like someone got cut of speaking.
What the hell else would it be?
FMLA. I start reading it as fuck my life before realizing it’s the family and medical leave allowance. So much hinges on that extra A.
fuck my life anally
now i’ve ruined it for you permanently
GUI. Stop sounding it out as gooey it makes me uncomfortable.
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.
There is nothing more productive than arguing with people over software names.
Let’s bike shed this sucker!
You say G-U-I? I’m sorry but I’m on the gooey side on this argument. G-U-I takes too long and sounds weird.
i agree. i am a recent gooey-convert. same with TUI (terminal ui), but not UI.
I’ve never had to say TUI. I usually just say “termainal” or “command line”. UI depends on the context, sometimes “u-i” sometimes “user interface”
a TUI is usually more interactive, such as Vim, and basically a full GUI, but rendered as text.
‘command line interface’ (CLI) typically means you type out commands and thats it, such as a Bash program or Git or something.
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.
its either that or soft g and that would be troublesome
gweee
“gooey”
I’ve literally never heard it any other way. O_O
IWPITTWAWOTAFTTDNKTY (I wish people in this thread would also write out the acronym for those that do not know them yet)
IA (I agree)
ATM. Friends use it for ‘at the moment’, but all I see is ass-to-mouth.
automated teller machine
I need to hit up the ATM machine.
WYSIWYG
What You See Is What You Get
- Used for software such as Microsoft Word, where formatting the text actually changes what you see on the screen
It is fun to say, though. wizywig
I am hearing it as a wizzy wig
That’s how people say it
Is that when Rincewind gone bald - Wizzard’s wig?
This one never really made sense to me. Like, yes, that’s what a screen is for?
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.
Ahh yeah that’s a good point!
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.
