The world is full of alphabet soup. As a special education teacher, I’m spouting out acronyms left and right. A writer friend on Facebook asked for help coming up with a phrase that would create an acronym to spell out a specific name for a robot character. We have become a country of letters that stand for emotions, actions, and everything we can shorten.
I blame Twitter, at least in part, for the explosion of complete phrases that have become a single word or series of letters. This, however, is not new. We have had radar and sonar around for a while, so long that they are no longer capitalized, are defined by words other than just the phrase they replaced, and are legal words in Scrabble. Some multi-meaning acronyms are not new either. There is a trade school in several western states that specializes in auto mechanics and was obviously named by males because when females hear UTI they do not think of Universal Technical Institute. Just think of the difference in meaning for DNR depending on if it is said on a lake in the backwoods of Wisconsin as opposed to the emergency room of a hospital. Sometimes the new alphabet soup really makes me think. It took a while for me to figure out why there is almost a completion for which athlete would be considered the GOAT. I thought they are animals used for milk when there isn’t enough food and/or space for cows. Originally these acronyms were designed to make our lives easier, but they can also interfere with real communication. The language of alphabet soup only works if everyone knows the code. If not, it only frustrates the sender and the receiver as much as if one person speaks only Swahili and the other speaks only Russian. In my case it has created somewhat of a generation gap with the younger generation fluent in acrospeak and those born before 1980 or so trying to figure out what all the letters mean. It may or may not be intentional, but it is getting harder for me to truly communicate with the younger generation.
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October 2021
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