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.
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.
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
As a kid, I was in the room at one point while my mom was watching some TV show, maybe law and order or something similar. I heard somebody letting somebody else know (verbally) the details of some victim and described the cause of injury or death or whatever as “GSW”. I asked my mom what GSW meant. She said “gun shot wound”. I said that that couldn’t possibly be right, and she was curious why. I said because “gun shot wound” is 3 syllables and “GSW” is 5; it’s literally quicker to say the full thing.
So yeah, GSW is fucking stupid when said aloud, and even me as a dumbass child knew that.
I hate “lol” as punctuation. If you’re legitimately laughing out loud, fine. But, I really hate:
“can I show u something lol”
“I gave it to David lol”
I agree lol
It’s infuriating to read all the comments without explanations what said acronym means.
IANAL but you should RTFM because PEBKAC.
(IANAL is my favorite ever acronym because it’s funny dammit… I was just looking for an excuse to sneak it in somewhere in this thread. RTFM is a fine acronym but I have such a negative association with it because it’s almost exclusively used by assholes. PEBKAC is just an elitist acronym whenever not used ironically.)
PEBKAC
Every time that I see this acronym I’m tempted to pronounce it as ['rʲefkas], then I remember “ah, it isn’t Cyrillic”.
Would that mean anything if it were?
No, but simply looking for something and then remembering that it doesn’t exist makes me feel stupid.
