How Acronyms Can Hide Meaning and Really Get Your GOAT

My, how we love our acronyms, or — to be more precise — how we love our acronyms and initialisms. An acronym is an abbreviation formed from a series of initial letters which can be pronounced as a word, like NASA, for example. An initialism is when the initials don’t make a pronounceable word, as in DNA.

No need to be picky, though. Acronym will do just fine as we explore some of the delights and pitfalls of using this oh-so-handy communicative tool.

Some abbreviations seem to have been with us so long that they seem like actual words. We are very familiar in the UK with the NSPCC and the RSPCA. Even if you might stumble over the precise wording, the references to cruelty to children and cruelty to animals are embedded in our collective consciousness.

This isn’t the case with more recent coinages, which may be clear to people who are familiar with their context, but can be baffling to anyone outside that particular field.

The use of such acronyms in news articles can make for a bumpy read, as you have to look back to check the explanation which usually follows the first usage. And on a purely aesthetic note, the proliferation of capital letters can be a bit jarring.


Acronyms can obscure their true meaning

More important, acronyms can disguise or lessen the impact of what they stand for. Take the more recent abbreviation, VAWG. You may or may not know that this stands for Violence Against Women and Girls. Look at the difference between the bland, meaningless acronym, and the impact of the full words. They need to be seen and spoken so that the message is widely understood.

It obviously takes up space to write names in full and it takes time to say each word, but until phrases like this become a part of our dialogue, as in earlier examples, it might be worth the minor awkwardness.

Online communication abounds in acronyms, and great fun they are, although not always. Some abbreviations, such as IDK and ASAP, are purely functional, and others which did have a personal or emotional element have lost it through over-familiarity. ROFL is in danger of becoming a lazy way of indicating amusement, with no acknowledgement of context or audience.

Every day, it seems, you come across one acronym whose meaning you have to look up, and some of them are so ephemeral that they’ve descended into disuse before you’ve had chance to display how OTB you are. (That’s On The Ball, and yes, it’s not very good, and yes, I just made it up.) Here, there are the same implications for communication as with the use of slang and jargon.

When your audience includes people outside your work circle or a particular social group, you could pause before literally or metaphorically pressing send. You don’t know how the recipient will react, and you don’t want to risk causing them to feel out of it, or stupid. (Of course, that might have been your intention, but that’s up to you).


Social studies

A delightful and intriguing aspect of acronyms is what they tell us about the social period in which they came into common use. You probably know SWALK, which stands for Sealed With A Loving Kiss. It was widely used by servicemen in the Second World War, among other much racier coinages, and the sweetness of its message caused it to be popular for many years after. Many a teenage girl in the 1950s and 1960s wrote the phrase, lavishly embellished with hearts and flowers,on letters addressed to film stars or pop singers or other objects of their affection.

Rather less sweet, but very revealing on several levels is the acronym used by debutantes as a warning to their sisters-on-the-circuit: NSIT. This stands for Not Safe In Taxis, and refers to male escorts who would take advantage of a situation to pounce on their female companion. What a wonderful example of sisterly solidarity as well as an insight into an aspect of sexual politics which is still relevant all these decades later.

Who would have thought that an element of 1980s’ Britain would be summed up by an acronym? Take a bow, Yuppies everywhere. This neat description of a particular social group, Young Upwardly-Mobile or Urban Professionals, sheds an interesting light on social attitudes in that decade.

What was originally a fairly neutral way of describing a certain demographic – after all, what’s wrong with any of those attributes – came to be a term of derision. These young professionals with their big hair, cellphones like bricks, and bulging Filofaxes, splashing the cash in City wine bars, were seen as epitomising the worst elements of the loads-a-money culture, and ‘yuppie’ was rarely used without a greater or lesser degree of mockery.


Get your GOAT

Some coinages manage to escape negative connotations in spite of their history and indeed their actual meaning. Take GOAT, for example. No disrespect to the hardy ruminant animal with its horns and beard, but the term is not a flattering way to describe the ‘greatest of all time’.

The secondary application of ‘goat’ to describe a lecherous man isn’t used so much these days, but the memory lingers, perhaps particularly with those for whom the word would describe someone as NSIT rather than as the greatest practitioner in their field…

The overuse of acronyms can clutter a conversation, either spoken or written, and can colour the exchange in unexpected and unwelcome ways. As with all communication, it’s important to be aware of context and audience. However, you never know. There’s one much-used long-standing abbreviation which originated in the armed forces in the Second World War, and which would generally be thought of as totally neutral. And so it is, other than to anyone for whom the phrase conjures up images of dashing soldiers and airmen saying goodbye with brave insouciance to women in slacks and red lipstick while the band plays ‘We’ll Meet Again’…

And so — TTFN.

(Ta, Ta, For Now)


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