Asklemmy

43939 readers

412 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

365

What is your least favourite acronym? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 10 months ago by thatsTheCatch to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

566 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Mine is OOO for Out Of Office. I always misread it in my head like a ghost and it takes me a few seconds to process. It also doesn't translate to speech—you have to say the whole thing.

Interested to see if others have similar acronyms they beef with.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] milo128@lemm.ee 43 points 10 months ago (1 children)

you're being pointlessly pedantic. Initialisms are also considered acronyms by most defimitions and by common use.

[–] Anonymouse@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I don't think they're being pointlessly pedantic. I've been around POS systems and some people call it by the letters, P.O.S. & others by the acronym, sounding like "pause". Nobody assumes you're talking about a Piece of Shit when you say "pause". Also for OOO ("oooh") vs O.O.O., which doesn't roll off the tongue, but you don't sound like Casper.

Now, being pointlessly pedantic, I find it interesting to think that if we continue to use the word acronym for initialisms, then the word acronym will actually be initialisms! English is weird!

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah when you say “pause” they assume you’re referring to a position.

[–] milo128@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

im not saying theres no difference between pronouncing each lettwer and pronouncing the whole thing like a word, just that both are generally considered acronymns so the correction was unnecessary.