SNAFUs and Other Assorted Acronyms #SoCS

The first acronym I can recall is SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up) which I read in some book or other — great WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle maybe) — when I was 10 or so.

A few years later, the same acronym provided a crack (for me) in the bullshit consistently spouted by every generation as it ages that “things were brighter, purer, clearer and children always listened to their parents,” but that’s a diatribe for another prompt.

Today it feels like an all-to-accurate description of life and career.

Today’s prompt is

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “acronym’.” Choose an acronym and use it any way you’d like. Enjoy!

Linda G. Hill blog prompt

Acronyms surround us and are effective shorthand.

They can be funny: SNAFU (well, I always thought it funny), PEBCAK, FUBAR

They can be dirty: DTF, GGG

Indicative of your personality: infp (thoughtful idealist) for me

Useful shorthand: TTYL, TL;DR (most of what I write!), OTOH, IDK

Express exasperation: FFS, GTFOH, WTF (I seem to use that one, at least in my head, often)

Convey emotion: ILY

You get the idea. I’ve heard people gripe about them for years as somehow a bastardization of language (you know, because language NEVER evolves and adapts to incorporate new ideas and things).

They’re also tremendously useful. They convey information quickly. They save your fingers from typing. They speed conversations.

They also serve as a marker of who’s an insider.

They can also be used to exclude someone from a conversation when someone decides to be an asshole.

In my youth (egads, I’m old enough to say that in reality now), I read a lot of military history and then studied International Relations (IR) in college. Both are rife with acronyms.

I then have found myself in the . . . lol, industry to be named later. SRSLY, we’ll just go with IDP for now (intelligent document processing). Which touches on ECM, IA, RM, IG, AI, RPA, ML, and on and on and on. That doesn’t count all of the IT-related terms used too.

I realized I had become an industry “insider” listening to some industry keynote or other. After it was over, I hadn’t had to think about what any of the acronyms used were. I just knew ’em.

Of course, any poor soul new to the industry would’ve been drowned in the sea of acronyms.

Which is why you always need to know your audience for when to use an acronym.

Keeping it short today, so off to the Walter’s Museum in Baltimore (if you’re ever in Baltimore, there are some fantastic museums in the city — many of them free)

And if someone says you shouldn’t use acronyms, just tell them: IDGAFWYT

As usual, a sampling of today’s background music (courtesy of some random playlist on Amazon)