Yet Another Pet Peeve
This time it's the intellectual laziness that surrounds the extensive use of acronyms in everyday life. As with anything like this, I always blame the government-run schools. No need to get into that for now.
For some of us in technical professions, the use of acronyms is nearly unavoidable. For example, one can excuse technical folks for shortening General Packet Radio System (a wireless data protocol) to GPRS. And a technical conversation would become quite cumbersome if we had to say Serving General Packet Radio System Support Node (a type of telecomm equipment) instead of SGSN. Of course, this can get out of hand. Listening to two telecomm engineers talk is like listening to a foreign language.
This semantic shorthand seems to be leaking into the general culture, though, and brevity is being replaced by laziness. We talk of SUVs and ATVs to the point that many can no longer even remember what the acronym stood for in the first place. Some acronyms get re-purposed much to the dismay of those not aware. PC originally stood for personal computer, but it has recently been appropriated to mean political correctness. The original meaning was relatively neutral while the replacement is insidious. The advertising profession is also responsible for a lot of viral acronyms. My daughter asked just the other day what does MSRP mean?
The loss of meaning has led to spurious redundancy. This redundancy has even been codified into print and advertising. We see there are ATM machines at convenience stores. In order to use the automatic teller machine machine you need a PIN number. You'll want to be careful not to stutter as you enter your personal identification number number into the ATM machine. And of course, you can't get any money out of your IRA account while using your PIN number at the ATM machine, because the IRS wouldn't approve. Remember, your individual retirement account account is supposed to be saved for a rainy day. See how ridiculous that sounds?
That's all for now, but stay tuned, I'll be back.
For some of us in technical professions, the use of acronyms is nearly unavoidable. For example, one can excuse technical folks for shortening General Packet Radio System (a wireless data protocol) to GPRS. And a technical conversation would become quite cumbersome if we had to say Serving General Packet Radio System Support Node (a type of telecomm equipment) instead of SGSN. Of course, this can get out of hand. Listening to two telecomm engineers talk is like listening to a foreign language.
This semantic shorthand seems to be leaking into the general culture, though, and brevity is being replaced by laziness. We talk of SUVs and ATVs to the point that many can no longer even remember what the acronym stood for in the first place. Some acronyms get re-purposed much to the dismay of those not aware. PC originally stood for personal computer, but it has recently been appropriated to mean political correctness. The original meaning was relatively neutral while the replacement is insidious. The advertising profession is also responsible for a lot of viral acronyms. My daughter asked just the other day what does MSRP mean?
The loss of meaning has led to spurious redundancy. This redundancy has even been codified into print and advertising. We see there are ATM machines at convenience stores. In order to use the automatic teller machine machine you need a PIN number. You'll want to be careful not to stutter as you enter your personal identification number number into the ATM machine. And of course, you can't get any money out of your IRA account while using your PIN number at the ATM machine, because the IRS wouldn't approve. Remember, your individual retirement account account is supposed to be saved for a rainy day. See how ridiculous that sounds?
That's all for now, but stay tuned, I'll be back.
posted by Anonymous | 12:32 PM
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