Acronyms! Acronyms! Acronyms!

[Unknown Beatle]

I've been using the internet now for seventeen years now and I've searched for an online family to belong to. Huffington Post, Bart Cop, Raw Story, Infowars (Just Kidding), and a couple others, and now my new family, DU.

But, a lot of the posts use acronyms which I've never seen before. I had to look them all up by using that Google thingy. TYMBI "Thought You Might Be Interested", SOH "Sense Of Humor", KWIM "Know What I Mean?", IDRC "I Don't Really Care". Sheesh, so many posts on DU using acronyms that I've lost count.

I'm not complaining, it's kind of funny actually, that I'll be reading a post or reply and then a freaking acronym and I have to interrupt what I'm reading to look it up.

[scarletwoman]

1. Nice post, but couldn't you shorten it to a few capital letters?

[3catwoman3]

2. After 4 years in the Air Force...

...Nurse Corps, I remember re-reading something in the journal that I kept at the time, and realizing I had a whole paragraph that had no real nouns in it - just military acronyms.

[jberryhill]

3. TANSTAAFL!

[pinboy3niner]

4. TL;DR

[Unknown Beatle]

7. I honestly had to

look it up.

lol

[jberryhill]

8. Well, YMMV

[gvstn]

10. You are obviously not a Redditor.

Every other comment on Reddit uses TL;DR. A one sentence post with 40 words: TLDR.

Thanks to Reddit; I actually have that one memorized

[Unknown Beatle]

12. Nope.

Never been a Redditor. Not even a Facebooker or a Twitterer.

[Jenoch]

5. Most of what you posted are not acronyms.

An acronym is a series of letters that can be pronouned as a word, SCUBA and SARS are examples of acronyms.

[jberryhill]

9. I thought those were diphthongs

[Unknown Beatle]

11. Yes, you're right,

but an acronym also includes, as an example, USA or CBS is pronounced as a string of letters. Your example is pronounced as a word containing all capital letters. There's also examples of acronyms with the first letter capitalized and the rest in small letters, like Radar.

In my examples in the post, they're pronounced as a string of letters, but they're acronyms nonetheless.

[Jenoch]

13. The only way USA can be considered an

ancronym is if it is pronounced '"yoosa, USA is not an ancronym, it is an initialism.

Radar, in any form is an ancronym.

The only way a string of letters, representing something else, can be an ancronym, is if the resulting ancronym is a series of letters can be said as a word. Here are futher examples: LASAR, NATO, UNICEF.

[Unknown Beatle]

15. I stand corrected.

I looked it up and you're correct.

I should have posted "Initialism! Initialism! Initialism!" instead. I'm being serious.

But you get the gist of the post anyway, I assume.

[lapfog_1]

6. The use of acronyms on the Internet predates most people's idea of when the "internet" started

It actually goes back to a time when it was the Arpanet...

and most people connected to it communicated using 1200 baud or even 300 baud modems... and sometimes teletype machines.

(300 baud was roughly 30 characters per second)

Every character transmitted or received took time and cost money... hence acronyms and short hand using ASCII.

Texting on cell phones then popularized the concept to the masses.

[Warpy]

14. It's "phonespeak," mostly

I don't have one of those things so I fly by the seat of my pants and can usually figure them out.

There have been a lot of misunderstandings between generations because of it, one of them being "Grandma died earlier today, LOL, Mom" Poor Mom thought it meant "lots of love." Oops.

If you get really stuck you can type the abbreviation into the Google box and usually the net in general will enlighten you. Obscure ones can be found at Urban Dictionary.

Or you can ask, by PM if you're too embarrassed to do it in a thread.

ETA: if you want to be confused by acronyms and bunches of initials, read a hospital chart sometime. HINT: SOB doesn't mean what you think it does.

[Unknown Beatle]

16. Thanks Warpy.

I truly appreciate it.

[Skittles]

17. YWISKSAA,UB?

LAT!!!!

[pinboy3niner]

18. We're gonna need...

...a bigger Urban Dictionary. With a Skittles page.

[Freddie]

19. A couple favorites (IIRC*)

* if I recall correctly
IANAL = I am not a lawyer
IOKIYAR = it's ok if you're a Republican