GoKawiilIn a recent post, I did a brief critique of what I called Acronym Marketing. It was so brief that it may have looked like it came from ignorance. But in reality after reflecting on it, I think it comes from two places: cultural differences and due to their overuse in marketing (As someone said it succinctly: HLA. Humans Like Acronyms). I hereby announce my new four part series: AFS (Acronym Fatigue Series), where I will explore my acronym aversion for my readers enjoyment:
This introduction where I explore why I’m wary of acronyms
Part 1: CAP, ACID – Why I’m wary even of formally sound acronyms
Part 2: DRY, KISS – Why I’m wary of well meaning advice acronyms
Part 3: OLAP vs OLTP, ELT vs ETL – Why I’m wary of acronyms pushing technical dichotomies
Acronymic Culture
First and foremost it comes from having a different cultural background. While we do have acronyms at home, they are not as ubiquitous as in English. We use them for institutions and also as abbreviations, but we have very few acronyms. While english has ASAP, BRB, TLDR, AFK, TGIF, LOL, ROFL, and so many more, in Spanish from the top of my head I can only recall TQM (“Te quiero mucho”, I haven’t used this since MSN), NTP (“No te preocupes”, first heard this last year), PQ/XQ (“Por qué/porque”, maybe used to text faster but nowadays I’ve only seen my dad use it).
On the other hand, my introduction to academia was specialized in the humanities, specifically History, but also in other related disciplines, and a bit of philosophy. There, I rarely read acronyms as tools to pack complex concepts and ideas. You don’t see Kant writing TCI instead of “The Categorical Imperative” or Rousseau writing TSC instead of “The Social Contract”. You usually see the creation of concepts (Biopolitics by Foucault, Zeitgeist by Herder, Orientalism by Said) or the use of nominalization. This is not to say that these concept packing techniques are not used in Software Engineering. It’s just that acronyms are way less used in the humanities, most probably because of the linguistically diversity in each discipline, while in Computer Science english is the default language for everything.
Note: This is just a thought, less than a thesis, or even a hipothesis. I have no formal proof that acronyms are actually more prevalent in English. Here’s a chart ChatGPT made for me based on this study’s dataset (MACRONYM, 2022).
Acronymic Marketing
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