Use of Acronyms and Initialisms in discussions

Hi John,

Wow, you're dedicated, to have compiled this list : )

It's good that you bring this up.

I too agree, it's always good practice to see the full expansion at least the first time, and then abbreviations can be acceptable in the rest of the article in question. However, I guess a few are generally accepted, such as V for volt since it is a unit. Hard to know what to do with those.

There is a school of thought that any two-letter abbreviations are better always expanded throughout the article, rather than only expanding at the first mention of it. So, for example NO and NC should always be expanded to normally open and normally closed, and NO and NC should not appear in an article according to that principle. I don't always follow it 100%, but it's a good guideline and common-sense can be used.

JAFMA

The interesting part with acronyms is that you'll often find that two people with a differing history of companies they've worked for will have wildly different interpretations for the same TLA, or equally two totally different ones for the same thing. For example, two places I worked for used CND and NFF for essentially the same thing. I try to avoid using TLAs for reasons like this, I'm probably not totally successful though

One of my favorites is PCMCIA: People Cannot Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

I was trying to guess CND/NFF and all I could think of was Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and then Nuclear Failure something as a guess : ) I needed to type it into google to find out what it really meant. The places I've worked, it would be a single-letter abbreviation, "U" (Unreproducible) if I've interpreted it correctly.

I can see the point that sometimes it's not desirable to expand, e.g. FPGA in an FPGA group, and guidelines are made to be sometimes broken. Sometimes I've found an audience is really not aware of certain abbreviations or even buzzwords, although I thought they should have been aware (i.e. my bad judgement - and it gets harder with technology that is just a year or two old, it might not have permeated as quickly as I had thought). It's a hard balance. Others I've forgotten (like TRIAC - I know what it is, but not what the abbreviation is any longer) due to passage of time. But then, possibly people don't need to know what TRIAC stands for, since it has almost become a word (much like RADAR). I just checked what TRIAC stands for, and it could be an anachronism to today try to understand the expansion.

So there are loads of subtleties to be factored in and always exceptions to guidelines.

I also see extremely long abbreviations like EoMPLSoGRE and they are generally expanded the first time, although it may be done in sections (i.e. EoMPLS is expanded and discussed, and then the oGRE bit is expanded.

shabaz wrote:

 

I was trying to guess CND/NFF and all I could think of was Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and then Nuclear Failure something as a guess : ) I needed to type it into google to find out what it really meant. The places I've worked, it would be a single-letter abbreviation, "U" (Unreproducible) if I've interpreted it correctly.

Sounds like you've got it right, but perfect example is that you have yet another way to denote the same thing.

When I used to work for a subcontract board manufacturer we used CND and could never work out why one of our customers sent some percentage of failed boards back to us labeled NFF. Later I changed job and started working for that same customer and discovered what NFF meant to them, and therefore also that whoever they had sorting out the returns didn't understand the acronym either!

I think the couple from "Blue Thunder" are also interesting.

SNAFU  Situation Normal All F ... Up.

JAFO Just Another F... Observer.

We have a couple that catch our newbies out.

RNO Return to Normal Operation.

U/S  unserviceable

DG Diesel Generator

LVO Low Visibility Operations

UPS Uninterrupted Power Supply, however it got confusing when the manufacturer also used the same but meant Universal Power Supply

mark

mcb1 wrote:

I think the couple from "Blue Thunder" are also interesting.

JAFO Just Another F... Observer.

 

Yay, someone got the JAFMA reference    Damn, now I'm feeling old

My own favourite, when having failed to get a piece of equipment or software to work, is RTFM

My own favourite, when having failed to get a piece of equipment or software to work, is RTFM