Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms

https://devz.cl/posts/acryonym-fatigue-series-why-i-m-wary-of-engineering-acronyms/

by DanielVZ • 17 days ago

60 68 17 days ago

devz.cl

lmpdev• 17 days ago

One thing that irks me quite a bit is when adjacent fields adopt the same acronym for different things

LoRa (RF tech) vs LORA (AI optimisation technique) GLM (statistics) vs GLM (AI model)

niccl• 17 days ago

yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.

Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...

stronglikedan• 17 days ago

That's why it's important to only use acronyms in their context, or provide the context when using them. And for goodness sake, expand them on the first use if you're audience is not already familiar with them! (and really, even if they are, it's just polite)

taneq• 17 days ago

Yeah, the TLA (three-letter acronym) space is vastly overcrowded and most TLAs are overloaded. This goes double for TLAs (two-letter acronyms). :P

JoshGG• 17 days ago

I enjoyed this article about AFSI.

tclancy• 17 days ago

I felt like it was just another WIWA rehash.

alex1138• 17 days ago

tl;dr

collinmcnulty• 17 days ago

I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.

DanielVZ4• 17 days ago

Absolutely! I’ll dive into this a bit more in the second section, where even technical acronyms can be considered harmful because they are learned at a surface level and then spread at meme-like speed.

For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea. In CAP it’s about linearizability, while in ACID it’s about preserving invariants.

koreth13• 17 days ago

For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea.

But wouldn't people still be unaware of the difference in meaning if the acronyms were spelled out? The word "consistency" appears in both names, with no indication that its meaning is context-dependent. I don't think you can lay the blame for this one at the feet of the acronyms.

sreekanth67• 17 days ago

absolutely. this is an illusion our mind believes.

sublinear• 17 days ago

There's also a power dynamic with which definitions take precedence.

You will always have to dumb it down for upper management. As soon as the acronyms come out, they will delay making decisions so that they don't have to take questions or be held accountable. If there is an acronym they use that's spelled the same way but means something totally different, you will have to avoid using yours even when it's the most appropriate term to avoid confusion.

My favorite example is ServiceNow using the term "CI" for "configuration item". You'll have to tell them in a lot more words what the deployment process is. :)

needSomeCoffee• 17 days ago

My pet peeve = authors who start using an acronym without ever "introducing" it. Suddenly there is an acronym used throughout an article, and one has to carefully go back and find the phrase to which it refers. Necessitated because the author was too lazy to introduce the acronym in parens after first using the phrase. Not sure how AI does this, but this problem predates AI by quite a bit.

SoftTalker• 17 days ago

YGTR!

BLKNSLVR5• 17 days ago

My girlfriend does not throw rugs!

mock-possum• 17 days ago

Ironically, you perform your own pet peeve here with ‘AI’ (Artificial Intelligence)

“Oh but everyone here knows what AI means,” you say, and yet that’s what the very authors you complain about said too.

BLKNSLVR5• 16 days ago

I'll ask Andrew Ingram how he does it next time I see him.

BrokenCogs• 17 days ago

IFHA

fouc• 17 days ago

some of my favorite forum communities heavily rely on acronyms. but they also have a maintained gossary that introduces all the community/industry-specific acronyms. Acronyms help boost the density of the information conveyed

stirfish• 17 days ago

It's also cheap shibboleth for communities - if you talk like we talk then you're one of us

gumby• 17 days ago

My company has a strict NTLA policy.

That’s No Three-Letter Acronyms

Instead we do name things after animals like Lamprey, Remora, Whelk, Axolotl, Tick (the last has not been approved)

thayne2• 17 days ago

That seems worse to me.

BLKNSLVR5• 17 days ago

You sound like team Axolotl, be more like Remora.

BLKNSLVR5• 17 days ago

How do you find out if Tick has been approved? Is that a recursion project?

zjp2• 17 days ago

Acronyms I can handle. What I've always hated is aNz style compressions. a11y, a16z, stuff that you can't even guess at a decoding unless you know it already.

BLKNSLVR5• 17 days ago

Yep, I've always thought they were f5g s4d.

Although that would make a cool number plate. Someone called Kate should get k8s c4r as her number plate. It would be an accurate description and also s4dly confusing.

If you don't understand anything I've written, you can catch my technical sales pitches here: https://t7ls3sp5s.com

hexasquid• 17 days ago

My screen reader says "eleven why" for a11y. I hope that's fine with everyone

Valodim• 17 days ago

I kind of understand for i18n, but not for most other things

jorisw8• 16 days ago

What could be the possible benefit of collapsing 'internationalization' to "i18n"? Which scarce resource (time? space?) was saved, in what context?

For example, I'll take "react-internationalization" over "react-i18n" for a package name any day.

Why obscure anything unless a clear problem was solved doing it, that warrants the ambiguity?

sph3• 17 days ago

Imagine if Germans had invented this style. Great compressibility, but good luck dealing with a65z.

jibal2• 16 days ago

I don't have to guess because I'm smart enough to look things up.

P.S. The response is a ridiculous non sequitur -- I didn't say anything either for or against such terms, just that their meaning can be discerned.

But I would note that all of language requires all readers to be familiar with terms and their meanings. And specifically, if people aren't familiar with the notion of language-independent code then they aren't likely to understand what "internationalization" refers to, and if they are familiar with the topic then they almost certainly know what i18n means ... and the time and effort that it took to learn it is infinitesimal relative to all the other language and meanings that they have acquired.

Further, the whole argument from this person is intellectually dishonest nonsense. They claim that terms like HTTP and NASA are "at the expense of the reader", which is simply false. I and most other readers would far prefer to see these acronyms and initialisms than to have them spelled out every time. (And it would be a disaster if http were spelled out in URLs -- and it would be a disservice to the reader to spell that out.)

jorisw8• 16 days ago

Yes, let's have each reader spend time and energy all day looking up abbreviations/acronyms/initialisms, so that the single writer can spend a little less time and energy in getting their own point across.

zjp2• 16 days ago

You know it never occurred to me I could look things up before. Everything I've ever known I learned orally. Even C. I remember sitting on pappy's lap, watching him wave his hand to draw out an asterisk in the air. "A pointer..."

Literary culture is so confusing.

Anyway, the editorial rule is to spell it out on the first use and then to abbreviate it:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced today... ...NASA says...

Many articles fail to do this and assume insider knowledge. It's all fine and good after you look it up or if you're an expert and familiar with the topic. Good for you. For everyone else, in other disciplines, or lay people, or for students, it's nice to extend the courtesy of spelling it out once.

thayne2• 17 days ago

I agree that acronyms can be overused, especially in marketing.

However, a big part of why Tech, software, computer science, etc. have a lot of acronyms is because there are a lot of new, often abstract things to name, and acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing. And I don't think anyone would really want to write out all of "hypertext transfer protocol" instead of http. And imagine if every url looked like "hypertext-transfer-protocol://world-wide-web.example.commercial/index.hypertext-text-markup-language". And if it had been given some other name, say "hyperprot" would that be any more meaningful than http?

Re: acronyms in English vs spanish.

I wonder if this is related to how human communication has a constant rate of information transfer. From what I understand, spanish is spoken faster, (more syllables per second) but has less information per syllable. One way that english is able to convey more information with less syllables is the use of acronyms and other abbreviations. And this is especially true for professional jargon that you use a lot to speak with colleagues at your job.

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.

I don't think any of those terms are much better than acronyms. Maybe the name gives you a vague idea of what they refer to, but like many acronyms they are labels for complex ideas that you can't really understand just by knowing what it is called. And these terms can be, and are used for "in-group signalling" in much the same way as acronyms.

Finally, tech is not at all unique in its abundant use of acronyms. I don't know about in other languages but at least in English, Math, Physics, and astronomy also make heavy use of acronyms (ODE, PDE, QED, LCD, AGN, LASER, QCD, SI, CGS, AU, BEC, etc.) And from what I've observed medical and sales professionals also use a lot of acronyms.

jadengeller• 17 days ago

when naming the protocol part of a url, obviously you don't want to pick something so verbose, but that doesn't mean you gotta pick an acronym. could be hyper:// or smth. not saying it should be, just saying there are other ways that a more verbose concept can be shorted for certain contexts

jorisw8• 16 days ago

Exactly. If people HAVE to save space, an abbreviation is much clearer than an initialism.

tomjakubowski• 16 days ago

Every day we stray further from gopher://

bryanrasmussen• 17 days ago

I don't think any of those terms are much better than acronyms

The Social Contract is so much better, it is pithy and you can even sort of guess your way to what it means, it has resisted change over centuries, it far out performs an acronym.

The Categorical Imperative is abstract, badly descriptive and overly intellectual, much like most of Kant. The Categorical Imperative instead of something like Essential Moral Principle or anything that sort of pointed at what was meant is really a sort of acronym in words, you need to be an expert to know what it means.

This is why the Social Contract is a phrase used by common people in many languages, and the Categorical Imperative is used by Philosophers - generally only when discussing Kant specifically.

OldOneEye• 16 days ago

Really small comment to what you wrote, but that's one of the things that make me love English over my own native language (Spanish): the way you can build and combine words to describe a complex idea, in a way that you would need a full sentence in other languages like French or Spanish.

Information density in the English language is higher than in romance languages, and that's great for work.

I vastly prefer to write documentation in English.

I, on the other hand, still prefer more indulgently verbose languages when it comes to lyricism and entertainment. There's a charm to it.

Paul_Clayton2• 16 days ago

For poetry, I think English has the advantage of Germanic and Latin roots. Such seems to offer some flexibility in tone.

The relative lack of conjugation and declension seems to hurt by constraining word order and reducing opportunities for sound similarity. Of course having rhymes be common also tends to reduce their impact.

Inflection (I think) is part of the cause of extra syllables, so has multiple impacts.

The length itself does seem to add something to the flow/lyricism, but I wonder if there is also a stronger sense of sound whereas English may be more a little more chaotic (not just having multiple roots but borrowing words more often).

jorisw8• 16 days ago

acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing

Convenience for the writer at the expense of the reader.

Convenience is no excuse to be unclear.

These names given to a thing may last for decades. Starting out naming them ambiguously is lazy and irresponsible.

Paul_Clayton2• 16 days ago

One can look at abbreviations as being like pronouns with the antecedent sometimes being stored in a cultural context or being placed at first reference in a potentially longish text.

Like pronouns, the 'antecedent' may be unclear causing difficulty for the reader. However, pronouns and abbreviations can help communication and be convenient to the reader.

Acronyms have the advantage of being pronounceable and so treated more naturally as words.

Like jargon, when the context is a historical first reference rather than first reference within a text of moderate length, the meaning can be obscure to those not familiar with the context. (One of my college essays was faulted for using "inertia" in the physics sense, specifically that a body in motion tends to remain in motion which is contrary to the common use of inert/inactive/unmoving. It was a natural use to me, particularly for the image used, but it was wrong for the audience.)

Assuming familiarity is a common human flaw (xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501 ). As has been mentioned this can also be used for in-group/expertise signalling. Yet density in communication does have value. (Math would certainly be tedious if every proof started from axioms.)

I agree that being unclear is bad, especially for mere convenience. On the other hand being verbose can be tedious and even insulting (by implying a lack of familiarity with matters obvious to the reader).

I thought the main problem with initialisms was not ambiguity but unfamiliarity. Yes, there are many AMAs and sometimes the local context is insufficient to remove ambiguity (in which cases the initialism might be expanded for clarity or context clues added). However, my experience has been more often that intialisms had no meaning to me (beyond immediate context) -- a vocabulary issue -- than my being uncertain which meaning was intended (ambiguity).

Specialized terms like the "Social Contract" can use capitalization to indicate a jargon use and the plain sense of the words does give some clues to the intent, but such can also risk a false sense of comprehension. The writer would actually be depending on the reader's familiarity with the jargon use.

(I wish Page Table Cache had been adopted instead of Translation Lookaside Buffer even though tee el bee seems to flow more more easily from the tongue. Besides being more complete -- a TLB also caches permissions and other page table entry information and could cache page directory entries -- "cache" has a modern jargon sense closer to the typical design and "lookaside" typically does not apply to L2 TLBs.)

Communication is difficult and taking the time to choose the very best writing is rare. Even with care, migration of word meaning or connotation can make a choice worse than alternatives (and the migration can be across cultures and not just across time).

[I am not concise, but I still like initialisms.]

jterrys• 17 days ago

I think I've accumulated enough acronym cruft in my middling age where it has introduced serious imprecision in my language and understanding. Particularly when the recycling of acronyms is so common. PTP, P2P, PVP, NTP, LDAP, DNS, SMTP, B2B, CRM, SAP, SATA, IDE, PCI...at some point these terms stop meaning anything to me anymore and my eyes glaze rather than recollect context

loaderchips• 17 days ago

I Have always found that acronyms are not the problem. They are necessary. However they become a problem when a lot of people start shoehorning them as attention targets instead of using them naturally in flow.

WalterBright• 17 days ago

I was disappointed that KAOS was not an acronym.

burnto• 17 days ago

Agree acronyms are often used to signal expertise and depth that isn’t really there, or even needed.

But I do think non serious acronyms should be still allowed: YAGNI, YAML, SNAFU, BHAG, GNU, etc.

jillesvangurp• 17 days ago

It's very similar to people that feel compelled to constantly name drop people and companies they've heard off that supposedly did some cool stuff that impressed them. A lot of the tech scene is people just blabbing at each other about who and what they've heard about.

Zecc• 15 days ago

Big Hairy Audacious Goal was a new one to me.

pixelpoet3• 17 days ago

Since we're talking about fatigue: weary*

dwb2• 16 days ago

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wary

pixelpoet3• 16 days ago

Yes, I'm aware of the word wary; now look up "weary". Wary as in "beware" is different from weary as in tired. I see this mistake all the time...

sph3• 17 days ago

Strange how it doesn’t mention how acronym usage is cultural. Americans and their military love acronyms, and they are very liberal in their usage compared to other languages.

There are at least a couple posters here with a clear background as USMC or similar whose insightful comments on geopolitics read like a sitrep from CENTCOM and get routinely called out to expand their acronyms.

American cultural affectations tend to take over on the Internet, and you know you’re talking with one when they expect you to be familiar with stuff like ACA (Affordable Care Act) or SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States)

EDIT: spent 3 minutes on Reddit and they can’t stop going on about the USMNT. The only country to use an acronym for their football national team.

jorisw8• 16 days ago

What's a sitrep?

What's USMC?

What's CENTCOM?

What's USMNT?

I wouldn't have to ask any of this were these expanded. Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms do nothing but to burden the reader for the sake of conveniencing the writer.

sph3• 16 days ago

Yeah, well the frustration is the point of my comment.

DanielVZ4• 16 days ago

It’s the first heading in the article. The first thing I wanted to convey.

koreth13• 17 days ago

I think context and audience matter a lot. The post seems to mostly be talking about acronyms in the context of writing that's aimed at a public audience, but a lot of acronym use is aimed at a much more targeted audience.

For example, I work on a product that pulls data about plant species from various data sources. I'm not about to type "Global Registry of Introduced and Invasive Species" or "Global Biodiversity Information Facility" everywhere; everyone on my team, and pretty much anyone working in this problem space, knows them as "GRIIS" and "GBIF." If I wrote the names out every time, it'd probably be less clear to my audience: they'd most likely have to reconstruct the familiar acronyms in their heads to follow what I was talking about.

forgotusername6• 17 days ago

The feeling of being an outsider because you don't know the acronym is just as real in non-public settings. The new guy on the team for example. There's a real feeling that you should already know it, even if it's the first time you've heard the other person say it. The first time you heard GBIF, did you know what it meant? How did you feel when you heard it?

koreth13• 17 days ago

Honestly? I looked it up on the glossary page of the company wiki and didn't feel much of anything about having to learn it.

At the time I didn't know what "Global Biodiversity Information Facility" referred to either, or why it was relevant to my team. Even without the acronym, I still would have had to go look it up or ask about it if someone used it with the expectation I was already familiar with it. I don't think the acronym had any significant effect on my experience of learning the concept.

jorisw8• 16 days ago

I think context and audience matter a lot.

I believe people who use a lot of (unexpanded) abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms, are lazy in their thinking about context and audience anyway.

The audience can be an assumption, especially in posterity. The context of where the message/document is read, isn't set in stone either.

jorisw8• 16 days ago

Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms[1] will always come at the expense of the reader. Saying the reader should know what they mean, is a lazy and short sighted assumption of who's reading and when (today? decades from now?)

Then the question is: what's gained to justify burdening the reader with ambiguity?

Space? In which modern context is space really a problem?

Time? You're just costing the reader time in having think about the meaning and possibly having to look it up

I can't honestly think of any other supposed benefit to collapsing something explicit into something ambiguous. More often than not, the writer is being lazy, short sighted, and in some cases, irresponsible.

When see someone use a lot of these in their daily discourse, I worry about their naming discipline in their code as well.

[1]

Abbreviation: esp. for especially

Initialism: HTTP for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol

Acronym: NASA (pronounced as a word) for National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

nonameiguess• 16 days ago

All communication assumes prerequisite knowledge, if nothing more than that the listener or reader can hear or see and understands language at all. The top post on page one right now is "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter." I can't see that a single person complained, including me, that we're simply assumed to know what Fable, reMarkable, and Tom Riddle's diary are. Of those three, I only know Fable. Expanding an acronym or initialism will probably result in more people understanding the meaning but that seems far less true of software tech specifications than common public language. Non-techies probably aren't going to know what hypertext is or the difference between a markup language and any other language and may very well recognize http and html better than their expansions.

xtiansimon• 16 days ago

Better an acronym than changing nouns.

For example, I work in hospitality bookkeeping/accounting. Back in 2018 on a call with Chowly I learned Third-Party Online Ordering (TOOS) to refer to the then growing list of companies such as Caviar, Grubhub, DoorDash, etc.

Meanwhile I continued to hear from colleagues a variety of descriptive nouns such as, delivery platform, third-party delivery, delivery apps.

Which was OK, until the market diversified and actual delivery companies appeared, Relay chief among them.

So when someone spoke of delivery-something the question was are you talking about food ordering or food delivery platform?

Funny, but a controlled vocabulary goes with bookkeeping like peas with carrots.

As an aside, i have to spend some time on the phone with vendors and got tired of the dogs breakfast of words used to spell out a serial number or email, Irving-Boy-Momma, Ice-Ball-Monday, and other endless variations. Now I’m Nato compliant, haha. India-Bravo-Mike.

Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms

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