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.
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.
Yeah same, Magic The Gathering it is.
Tap to deal 5 damage to target creature or player, then add three recharge counters to Jewish Space Laser.
During the untap phase, if there are any recharge counters on Jewish Space Laser, instead of untapping remove one counter. Otherwise, untap as normal.
I haven’t played Magic in 25 (maybe 30?) years, but you captured the tone for sure. Do you work for Wizards?
I wish, but no
I worked at a bank for a couple years so I read that as “Mortgage” unless it’s all caps lol
Yes! Imagine not being American, and Magic is the only thing you could ever associate MTG with.
I keep trying to figure out what Magic the Gathering has to do with Jewish space lasers.
tbf, it wouldn’t surprise me if those show up in a set at some point
Not an acronym. Unless you pronounce it “Muttaguh” or something?
this guy going around saying “oosa” instead of USA 😂
Is that not what it’s called???
Oosa Jar Jar Binks
It sounds like you’re saying “You ass”
Who me? Or the one I was replying to, right? 😄
Come on now. We know this is only because people usually don’t know the difference, not because it’s correct. Acronyms are pronounced as words, initialisms are spoken one letter at a time. Every article I’ve clicked says the same thing, confirming what I said. I’m doubling down. 😁
Eh, I know I’m supposed to fight my way up this hill and take it, but I’m just so damn tired. You’re most correct. I acquiesce and stand in awe of your wisdom and grace.
😄 Okay that’s too generous lol. I know of certain things, but I know I’m dumb as shit about other stuff. ❤️
SQL
Nobody but me wants to adopt this, but I insist this should be “squeal”.
It’s weird, when I say SQL I pronounce it sequel. But I pronounce MySQL as my-s-q-l. Never thought about squeal. Maybe that’s for sqlite? Squealite
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.
I guess it’s faster to write, so people started to say it as well.
How often do You have to use the phrase “gun shot wound” in everyday speak? Found the American.
It was specifically in a police TV show, spare us the tried joke.
It’s used a lot in law enforcement and certain medical environments like hospitals with trauma centers and morgues.
In law enforcement? Probably every day, yeah. The average person, surprisingly not all that often. In fact, law enforcement probably uses it hundreds of times a day, and more importantly writes and reads it hundreds of times a day, thus the acronym.
Even that is a very American way of thinking. The number of gun shot wounds a police officer sees in the US is way higher than in comparable European countries.
I could not find exact data for wounds, but if you take gun fatalities as placeholder (I am sure they are connected) here:
You can see that precovid (2019) in the US there were 63x more gun fatalities than in Germany per person. In an average 1 million person city the police in the US has to deal with about 32 gun fatalities. In Germany that city has 1 every other year, in Australia it is 1-2 every year.
While the fictional US police department has every two weeks one or more fatality, the fictional German and Australian see it once a year.
So the frequency of it occuring and it being written about is way higher in the US than in comparable countries.
(Of course the comparing the amount of firearm fatalities between countries is not an exact replacement for gun shot wounds, but it should be close)
Don’t worry, I liked your post.
W does that in acronyms. Compare syllables in World Wide Web…
At work we often say “dub dub dub”.
“Dubya” is one syllable, maybe two depending on your particular accent
Edit: Unfortunately I was extremely stoned at the time of this message and that should have been “[…] two syllables, maybe one depending […]” but I’m leaving it up as evidence of my dumbshittery since it spawned discussion. Don’t do drugs kids
In what accent is “dub-ya” one syllable?
Some parts of texas
Anything more than “dub” will be 2+ syllables.
The b is silent and the vowels ran together
So “duh”?
I’ve heard some folks where it comes out more akin to “dubby”
Dub-by is still 2 syllables
WTF?
WWJD?
WTFWJD??
GSW isn’t an acronym as far as I’m concerned. It’s an initialism. But it sure is stupid, I will say. Much faster to say it the “long” way.
I think you mean GSW IAAAFAICIAI
Given how many times people make this same initialism point, it’s time we made an acronym for it.
That’s an unfortunate, incorrect phrasing. 😅
It’s a very deliberate phrasing, since not everyone agrees that initialisms are not acronyms.
Personally I think that “ackhually that’s an initialism not an acronym 🤓” is exactly the kind of ultimately irrelevant distinction that internet know-it-alls love to know and point out. I know because I used to be like that too when I was younger.
But often those distinctions are not universally acknowledged or useful in all contexts. Like how strawberries are not scientifically berries, but we still often group them as berries.
Nitpicking word definitions is pointless when the distinction being pointed out is not relevant for the conversation.
I’m not saying I’m the tone of “aaackshually”.
I personally love to learn these types of things, so in case someone learns something they’d like to learn, I’m here for it. If people get butthurt or annoyed about it because “I’ve been using it wrong and that makes it right…” 🤷♂️ I dunno.
Where in the world do you live that you need five syllables to ‘GSW’?
Any English speaking country? “Gee-ess-dou-ble-u”. 5 syllables.
Yeah, you’re right, I’m wrong.
Not the south! Gee-ess-dub-ya ftw.
Hate to burst, but I believe “dub-y-ah” would still be 3. Even though it’s fast enough that it’s barely perceptible.
Nah, dubyah is two syllables dub-yah. Unless you somehow make yeah into a two syllable word.
There’s a context here though, namely that it is preceded by a “bh”. But I’ll concede.
That’s most assuredly not another syllable. Dub, as in I dub thee. Ya, as in ya, I know. There’s a glide across a very sliiiiiight E sound, but it’s also present when you just say “ya”, it’s more “e-ya”. So either “ya” is two syllables, or dub-ya is two.
I’m inclined to go either way on this one. It’s very slight.
Say W really slowly out loud and count the syllables. Where do you live that W isn’t three syllables?
I was counting double as one syllable. It’s still early on Sunday morning for me here.
In a lot of the US, w is pronounced as two syllables in conversational speech: dub-yuh
That doesn’t excuse my stupidity because I’d guess that the places that say dub-yuh also say eh-yuss for ‘s’.
A lot of them do, yes.
Netherlands. It’s pronounced “way” here
So youse say way way way dot com?
Dot in dutch is punt
Way way way Punt!
Scooooooorrrrrreeeee!!!
Putting this on a T-shirt
Well, yeah way way way google punt com
“Dub-yah”
I’ve heard WWW pronounced: dub-dub-dub
Gee Ess Dub-ya
This gave me cancer
In English it’s G-S-Dou-ble-U
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.
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?
Just to be “that 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 “year/make/model/body” and so I always start reading YMMV wrong and that bugs me
I care, but mostly because it’s fun. Just like apparently there’s no such thing as a fish, and that fruits are vegetables…
I thought vegetables weren’t a botanical classification?
Today I learned that laser is an acronym. “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”
Radar and sonar are both acronyms as well.
Initialisms are a type of acronym. All initialisms are acronyms but not all acronyms are initialisms.
Other way around.
Sometimes, initialism or alphabetism is used to refer to acronyms formed from the string of initials which are usually pronounced as individual letters
Hmm, okay, it’s apparently debated. However, the only way I’ve learned it is that initialisms are words formed from initial letters of included words, and acronyms are initialisms pronounced as words. It seems like it varies by country as well.
I think it makes logical sense that acronyms are initialisms, since initialism just implies that it’s formed from the initials, thus all abbreviations formed from the initials of the words are initialisms, while a subset of those can be pronounced as a word and thus can be called acronyms. Personally I think it’s very important that things are named such that one can logically deduce their origin and meaning.
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 “What 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.
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.
WYSIWYG is also pretty common these days for tabletop gaming, with regard for models using the rules for whatever weapons or equipment they are actually holding. This came around as often people build the model one way (e.g. with a machine gun) before a rule change, after which they want to use the better rules without re-doing the model (e.g. with a flamethrower).
And designing graphical UIs and having the tool generate skeleton code for you. Good times.
There’s also WYGIWYW (“What You Get Is What You Want”) and is primarily used for latex, because you give up some manual control for a (allegedly) better looking result.
I agree, most fin acronym to say
It’s infuriating to read all the comments without explanations what said acronym means.
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.)
And still this MF (Mother Fucker) doesn’t write what any of it stands for.
IANAL - I am not a lawyer
RTFM - Read the fucking manual
PEBCAK - Problem exists between chair and keybord
When will you ever use pebcak?
I work in IT, so we see pebcak issues fairly often
Along with the classic ID-10t error. Although, I’ve always seen it as PEBKAC.
Could also be a layer 8 issue.
I, also, ANAL.
Totally agree on RTFM, I almost exclusively see it used by people who really need to put you down to feel adequate. Same thing with the assholes who answer a question with a LMGTFY (let me Google that for you) link, who think they’re clever but have entirely missed the point of asking for input from actual humans.
I don’t know PEBKAC and I’m kind of afraid to look it up.
PEBKAC
Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
Like that time my uncle told me his laptop wasn’t charging and I discovered that he’d plugged a phone charger into the headphone socket.
Also occasionally PICNIC for problem in chair, not in computer.
Oh, ok, I remember that now, thanks.
I’ll see about forgetting it again because it irritates me lol.
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Everyone knows how to Google today, this isn’t 1992 where the internet was new and we had to teach search engine usage in school.
People ask questions in forums (online and otherwise) because they want answers from people who don’t need to Google it. They’re asking for a real interaction with a real human being who knows what they’re talking about and can be asked follow up questions.
It’s hard to believe, but there are still people out there who just want the human interaction more than a clinical answer.
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You sound like a great reason not to work where you work.
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PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair, meaning it’s a user error
PEBKAC
Every time that I see this acronym I’m tempted to pronounce it as ['rʲefkas], then I remember “ah, it isn’t Cyrillic”.
Would that mean anything if it were?
No, but simply looking for something and then remembering that it doesn’t exist makes me feel stupid.
PEBKAC is just an elitist acronym whenever not used ironically.
Nah, that’s IT people venting due to the overpopulation of (L)users.
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A cool turn on that one is by the Arch Linux Wiki, which calls it Read The FINE Manual. Owning to the fact that this particular wiki is quite excellent. I use Arch BTW.
Are you an Analrapist?
I was, but I’m making ANUSTART
IDK WTF TAM.
TAM?
“there”
IITRATCWEWSAM means what op said.
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.
IWPITTWAWOTAFTTDNKTY (I wish people in this thread would also write out the acronym for those that do not know them yet)
IA (I agree)
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.
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. ;-)
Oh wow! I knew about TWAIN (technology without an interesting name), but that takes the cake!
Sorry to ruin the fun but it stands for “Personal Computer Memory Card International Association”
There is a joke around the name, as you said, though :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Computer_Memory_Card_International_Association
Nothing ruined :) I knew that, and wanted to share the fun version first. Thanks for providing the true version, of course.
Another real acronym with a funny story (maybe only to old geeks like me) is STONITH.
Back when “high availability” meant two servers with shared storage and a “heartbeat” network connection, if one of the servers failed, the second one would notice there was no more heartbeat from the first and pick up the traffic so users would never know.
However, if the servers lost the network connection, there’d be no way to tell if the other server was still running and if both continued accessing the shared storage, they could corrupt the application data. So each server could take over if it noticed the other wasn’t available by executing STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head) basically sending a power down signal to the PDU, making sure the other node couldn’t corrupt data.
That is amazing! Thank you for this!
My dad is from the punch card era and he had stories like this. But that one is new to me!
Installing linux drivers / modules for PCMCIA wifi cards :(
That’s the neat part, you don’t
Happily it started being known as PC-CARD.
Ftfy always becomes “fuck that, fuck you” in my head.
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.
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.
There’s also FTFY, which I thought was a way of throwing offence at the topic and the person that brought it up
I’ve been told what it means yet every time I see it my brain goes “for the…” and I can’t figure out the last 2 letters. And I have to look it up to be reminded that it means “fixed that for you”. But every time I forget and I have to look it up again.
Fuck That, Fuck You
Haha I love that
But Fuck that & Fuck you.
Maybe you’re more of an ft4u kinda guy
Same.
For the fucking year?
Free Eggos ftfy! Alright!
For the fiscal year
It’s used so frequently for offences that I’m not surprised at that.
After “fuck the what” it started to mean “For the win”. What else is it supposed to be?
What else is it supposed to be?
- fear the whales - because sharks are not enough.
- ferry the warriors - how else will they reach Hades?
- fuck the West - yes, I had to politicise this.
- feed the woodpeckers - hipster version of granny throwing popcorn to the pigeons.
- feel the wetness - this is sounding like porn already.
This list gets progressively more FTW.
It means fuck the world. But some jerk made it for the win and ruined all my fun
I’ve never heard “Fuck the What”, it’s always been “Fuck the World” before also becoming “For the Win” for me.
Fuck the world.
But it’s normally For the win?
Friday Tuesday Wednesday, for some reason
Dated someone with FTW tattoo. I always thought it was Fuck the World but he sweaaaars he meant it as “Forever Two Wheels”, some motorcycle thing. Yeh right bud.
These two sayings mean the same thing. They both mean “I’m not staying here”
It’s always been For The Win to me. Fuck the world seems to have been before my time.
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Not an acronym unless you pronounce it “Futtawuh” or something.
Which I do.
😄👍 Nice
I always read ofc as “of fucking course” it makes no sense to include the f.
