Thursday, February 06, 2020

Down With Acronyms!


I hate acronyms. English is littered with a mind-boggling and confusing collection of shortcuts. These seems to proliferate most in the medical field where people are labeled with an endless list of capital letters like this: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/appendixb.html

But it seems every group has its own personal set of acronyms. Writers, who one might imagine love to hear the flow of nice long, genuine words all spelled out are noted for a long list of abbreviations. You can read some of those here: https://kathysteinemann.com/Musings/abbrev/

In my teaching career I found plenty of alphabet soup: http://images.pcmac.org/uploads/nyecounty/nyecounty/divisions/documentscategories/documents/acronyms_1.pdf

Then there's the political world where nothing is sacred: https://www.allacronyms.com/political/abbreviations

Can't we stop this?  Can't we take a little more time and say Post Traumatic Stress Disorder instead of PTSD? Or Work In Progress instead of WIP?

Please stop the flood of acronyms!

No comments: