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.
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.
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
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 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?
Air Conditioning
That one’s cool.
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.
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
Initialisms are a type of acronym. All initialisms are acronyms but not all acronyms are initialisms.
FTW. For years I thought it meant “Fuck The What”. Even now that’s the first thing that comes to mind and have a hard time remembering the actual meaning.
There’s also FTFY, which I thought was a way of throwing offence at the topic and the person that brought it up
Fuck the world.
But it’s normally For the win?
deleted by creator
After “fuck the what” it started to mean “For the win”. What else is it supposed to be?
What else is it supposed to be?
- fear the whales - because sharks are not enough.
- ferry the warriors - how else will they reach Hades?
- fuck the West - yes, I had to politicise this.
- feed the woodpeckers - hipster version of granny throwing popcorn to the pigeons.
- feel the wetness - this is sounding like porn already.
It means fuck the world. But some jerk made it for the win and ruined all my fun
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.
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.
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.”
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.
IWPITTWAWOTAFTTDNKTY (I wish people in this thread would also write out the acronym for those that do not know them yet)
IA (I agree)
CAPTCHA is pretty bad, apparently it’s Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
Source: http://www.captcha.net/
Edit: I also dislike www, it’s annoying to say 👎
People in my old company used to genuinely say dub dub dub as in “double-u double-u double-u”. Fucking dicks 😂.
I never understood why it’s called double-u. It looks more like a double-v. Most of the time, the sound in words is even more similar to a V than a U. There is probably some reason in ancient versions of the letters.
It’s the correct way to speak a URL… dub dub dub dot something dot com == https://www.something.com
Correct way is to double-u, not dub.
My least favorite is IANAL (no pun intended), my favorite is RTFM, I use it a lot!
BofA is ugly but it’s mainly a US thing, no one else uses it.
lots of people use bofa! >!bofa deez nuts!<
I can only read it as “I Anal” and the teenage boy in me giggles and I forget what I am reading.
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.
There’s an RFC for TLAs: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5513
PICNIC. problem in chair, not in computer.
Ha, I always knew this concept as PEBKAC - problem exists between keyboard and chair.
My favorite is GIF cause we all agree how it’s pronounced, no confusion there. If you think it’s said the other way you are wrong and very stupid.
Choosy moms choose GIF
Ftfy always becomes “fuck that, fuck you” in my head.
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”?
Well that’s the whole point, ain’t it?
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.
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.
