this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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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 speechβ€”you have to say the whole thing.

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

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[–] [email protected] 161 points 10 months ago (19 children)

Mtg. A lot of posts and articles use it for Marjory Taylor Green an it always confuses me, I keep trying to figure out what Magic the Gathering has to do with Jewish space lasers.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago

Yeah same, Magic The Gathering it is.

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[–] [email protected] 149 points 10 months ago (36 children)

As a kid, I was in the room at one point while my mom was watching some TV show, maybe law and order or something similar. I heard somebody letting somebody else know (verbally) the details of some victim and described the cause of injury or death or whatever as "GSW". I asked my mom what GSW meant. She said "gun shot wound". I said that that couldn't possibly be right, and she was curious why. I said because "gun shot wound" is 3 syllables and "GSW" is 5; it's literally quicker to say the full thing.

So yeah, GSW is fucking stupid when said aloud, and even me as a dumbass child knew that.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 10 months ago (6 children)

I guess it's faster to write, so people started to say it as well.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (9 children)

W does that in acronyms. Compare syllables in World Wide Web…

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[–] [email protected] 138 points 10 months ago (18 children)

POS I find very funny as I'm often working on Point-of-Sale equipment, and most of it is running Poorly Optimized Software, making the whole thing a Piece of Shit for the users.

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 10 months ago (11 children)

I hate all acronyms that aren't defined.

You see it constantly in gaming communities. Ah, yes, the game "AC." You know the one.

Assassin's Creed? Animal Crossing? Armored Core? Ace Combat?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (8 children)

You know tf2? The beloved multiplayer game with great lore that still got hundreds of thousands of players more than a decade after its release even though the devs mostly abandoned it and it got overrun by bots? No, the other one.

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (9 children)

Just to be β€œthat guy” I wanted to say that an acronym is technically an initialism that you pronounce as a word, like SCUBA, LASER, or NASA. If it’s just letters that stand for something, it’s called an initialism. No one cares (not even me), but I had to say it :P

Most acronyms that have a W in them are pointless to say aloud in English. It’s almost always shorter to just say the words. Like WTF, for example. Those are my least favorite

Oh and YMMV. I used to work with car data and we would use YMMB to mean β€œyear/make/model/body” and so I always start reading YMMV wrong and that bugs me

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Don’t have a least favourite.

But my favourite is WYSIWYG has been mine for 20 years now, it’s so fun to say.

It stands for β€œWhat You See Is What You Get” and was used for visual editing programs where you could move things around and the final product would reflect that.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago (2 children)

For those who don't know, much of the reason WYSIWYG is so fun is because the accepted pronunciation is "whizzy-wig"!

As a term it rarely gets used any longer, because "visual editors" are now the norm, where once they were the rarity.

Before visual editors, you'd have content on a screen like a document which you could only see how it would actually look by physically printing it onto a piece of paper. This is because the printer itself knew about fonts and paper size and all that, and the editor didn't.

Nowadays even with technically non-WYSIWYG editors like markdown text you can still instantly preview the rendered output on screen, so there isn't as much need to call it out as a feature.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 10 months ago (5 children)

It's infuriating to read all the comments without explanations what said acronym means.

[–] xmunk 30 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (19 children)

IANAL but you should RTFM because PEBKAC.

(IANAL is my favorite ever acronym because it's funny dammit... I was just looking for an excuse to sneak it in somewhere in this thread. RTFM is a fine acronym but I have such a negative association with it because it's almost exclusively used by assholes. PEBKAC is just an elitist acronym whenever not used ironically.)

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (4 children)

And still this MF (Mother Fucker) doesn't write what any of it stands for.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 10 months ago (8 children)

Do you remember before we had usb devices, our laptops had credit-card-sized PCMCIA slots?

I love that word. What's it mean? People can't memorise computer industry acronyms. ;-)

[–] flambonkscious 22 points 10 months ago

Oh wow! I knew about TWAIN (technology without an interesting name), but that takes the cake!

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[–] anonymouse 47 points 10 months ago (15 children)

FTW. For years I thought it meant "Fuck The What". Even now that's the first thing that comes to mind and have a hard time remembering the actual meaning.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (7 children)

There's also FTFY, which I thought was a way of throwing offence at the topic and the person that brought it up

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 10 months ago (11 children)

My least favorite is IANAL (no pun intended), my favorite is RTFM, I use it a lot!

BofA is ugly but it's mainly a US thing, no one else uses it.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago

lots of people use bofa! >!bofa deez nuts!<

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Ftfy always becomes "fuck that, fuck you" in my head.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 10 months ago (1 children)

IWPITTWAWOTAFTTDNKTY (I wish people in this thread would also write out the acronym for those that do not know them yet)

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago (10 children)

Norway has a weird obsession with making translated acronyms for well established terms. Lately, after many years of use of "AI", the Language Council decided that the term should be changed to "KI", as that is the "correct" Norwegian acronym. Not only does it feel wrong to say, but it invades another local acronym for me.

To top it of, that council decided to make "KI-generated" the "word of the year", which seems like a pat on their own shoulder to brilliantly making the acronym.

I hate it.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 months ago (9 children)

I always read ofc as "of fucking course" it makes no sense to include the f.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Had an old colleague who kept abbreviating 'follow up' as 'f/up.'

"Yeah we should be okay, I'll f/up on that later today."

"Hey are you able to f/up on this?"

"Hey, I f/uped with our boss today on our issue."

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago (1 children)

FMLA. I start reading it as fuck my life before realizing it’s the family and medical leave allowance. So much hinges on that extra A.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 10 months ago

fuck my life anally

now i've ruined it for you permanently

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago (18 children)

My favorite is GIF cause we all agree how it's pronounced, no confusion there. If you think it's said the other way you are wrong and very stupid.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Jraphical interchange format

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago (3 children)

SQL when pronounced as sequel. Squall or even squirrel would have been nicer imo

[–] [email protected] 55 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Their original product was called SEQUEL. Structured English Query Language. They got sued by a company called sequel so changed it to SQL, but everybody still calls it sequel.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

oh cool. my dislike for it was out of ignorance as often the case. thanks for letting me know

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I'll pile on an list FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). It's dumb as both a concept and acronym. Though sadly, it's also quite a successful marketing tactic.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

How is it dumb as a concept? Is it not a way to describe human nature?

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)

I don't really like it when people use acronyms when talking about music albums, it always takes me far too long to figure out what they actually mean.

Special shoutouts to TDSotM and ItCotCK.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (10 children)

ETA, but not the estimated time of arrival that everyone knows.

The ETA that Tumblr and XX chromosomes made popular that actually means Edited to add...

Rather than just Edit: or E:.

But it means I added something!... Right... That's literally the definition of edit... Blood is thicker than the water of the womb too right? Lmfao.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (12 children)

GUI. Stop sounding it out as gooey it makes me uncomfortable.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Related, OOP for Out Of Pocket. In software, its Object Oriented Programming. My programming lead uses the first meaning in email frequently

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (4 children)

GOP is shitty one for sure.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (6 children)

iYKYK. Took me forever to figure out what it means.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (11 children)

MVP. It means two things, both are polar opposites. Absolute bare minium product, or most valuable player / product.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (8 children)

WYSIWYG

What You See Is What You Get

  • Used for software such as Microsoft Word, where formatting the text actually changes what you see on the screen
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (5 children)

I'm going to answer the opposite question. My favorite acronym is TLA (three letter acronym)because it mocks the whole system.

I also love OOO specifically because it is ghosty.

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