Annoying Abbreviations

[Empath]

Not a single person here has mentioned where and why these acronyms started from and there reason in this world. They started when txt messaging started to grow popular but everyone had regular cell phone with numeric keypads using T9 entry. It was a total PITA to type in long words so people starting shortening things and replaces letter combinations with shorter words which phonetically worked (ie: Ill B L8).

I don't see the big deal - if you don't know an acronym google it - next time you will.

BTW - IMHO the thread has me ROFLMFAO! :fail:

Those acronyms were around decades before the concept of texting, or the texting devices. Those in particular were used on bulletin boards (BBS) and Usenet before a PC was even available to anyone other than hobbyists. Acronyms have been in use over a hundred years before that.

 

[Burgess]

Yet another great CPF thread !

lovecpf
_

 

[Dr Evil]

I hate all acronyms with a passion. That is one thing that sucks about my job. It ticks me off even more when somebody try to pronounce it as a word. Ever heard of EbN0? A coworker pronounced it just like it looks. I gave him the WTF look and asked him "what is that?" Luckily it is on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eb/N0

On another note, I'm trying to find a list of acronyms used here. I keep running across ones I don't know.

 

[jabe1]

It seems that much of this has grown from laziness disguised as convenience.

The whole thing drives me crazy. If any of you have a teenage daughter you need to communicate with, texting is critical.
My thumbs are just too large...:laughing:. I do insist on spelling it out (almost always), and proper puntuation.

 

[Launch Mini]

WWW
It is an abreviation that has more syllables when you pronounce it than when you say the 3 real words..
Double you double you double you
vs
World Wide Web

IIRC

YMMV

Pretty much all of them...

oh yeah, and the three dots...

 

[ShineOnYouCrazyDiamond]

It seems that much of this has grown from laziness disguised as convenience.

The whole thing drives me crazy. If any of you have a teenage daughter you need to communicate with, texting is critical.
My thumbs are just too large...:laughing:. I do insist on spelling it out (almost always), and proper puntuation.

I don't think that is entirely true.

Most texting acronyms or shortenings come from back in the early days of cell phones (ya know - way back in 1998) when everything was T9 text entry. It was a time saver to type and tell your wife you were going 2 B L8 than the whole thing when you had to click 30 times just to get a character.

The other acronyms that all you guys are complaining about are actually all industry specific acronyms. Every industry has them. I work in IT and I live in a world of TCP/IP, SMTP, WWW, NICs, iSCSI, SATA, SAS, MIME and all that good stuff. Everyone of those acronyms means something to me. But I work in an investment firm and when I listen to the traders talking or my friends in investment banking, well they speak a whole different language of acronyms:NYSE, SEC, PnL, etc. I am sure doctors, engineers, pharmacists and every other industry out there has its own acronyms.

Just because you don't understand them doesn't make there anything wrong with them.

 

[Dr Evil]

The acronyms that really tick me off are real words that than have a word for each letter trying to say something. Take BEAST for example. It stands for Basic Expeditionary Airman Skills Training.

 

[nbp]

Pretty much all of them...

oh yeah, and the three dots...

I believe that's actually called an ellipsis.

 

[ShineOnYouCrazyDiamond]

And you would prefer to write Basic Expeditionary Airman Skills Training in a document 1,000 times rather than just BEAST?

 

[Dr Evil]

Copy and paste. That's not the problem though. It seems as if someone thought BEAST sounded cool or hard. Then they came up with a word for each letter.

 

[booky]

ROTFLSHMSFOAIDMT

Rolling On The Floor Laughing So Hard My Sombrero Fell Off And I Dropped My Taco

 

[booky]

ROTFLSHMSFOAIDMT

Rolling On The Floor Laughing So Hard My Sombrero Fell Off And I Dropped My Taco

 

[Bone_Enterprise]

While it is not an abbreviation, the trend of everyone saying 'fail' gets under my skin for some damn reason, SMH like already mentioned also does as well.

Then there are the various truncated words that are literally a letter or two a way from spelling the actual word.