Wednesday, September 07, 2005

TLA is not a TLA

I work in iT and must therefore suffer the slings and arrows of the continual use of Acronyms such as MCP, TCP, UDP etc etc... However, a common mistake regarding use of such language is that the monicker applied to these annoying terms, "TLA" is in fact not an Acronym for "Three Letter Acronym". It is in fact an Initialism. An Acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a name and must be pronouncable as a word. An example of this would be FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition) and another widely used in my line of work - PEBSAD (Problem Exists Between Seat And Desk). Others like RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual) or STFO (Switch The Fucker Off) are correctly known as Initialisms, which are abbreivations consisting of the initials of a name or phrase.

6 comments:

MrNoxious said...

Therefore your initial sentence "....the continual use of Acronyms such as MCP, TCP, UDP etc etc..." is incorrect.
Hehe :)
OK, now i'll STFU

Chris said...

As used extensively by Hospital staff to communicate about difficult patients on their notes

TEETH
tried everything else try homeopathy

Fella said...

I bow before your 733T vocab skillz.

Tao said...

You are....

Tao said...

Then again SwimPig with that whole Hoover/Vaccum Cleaner thing...

bigfootcookie said...

STFO and JFDI are my favourites.

Just Fuckin Do It