Acronyms: they shorten big, long names into short, little letters. Fun, right? No. Acronyms are stupid, and I have created one, P.H.U.N.C., in order to illustrate my point.
P stands for Phonetics: How does one pronounce acronyms? They are absolute nightmares to read, write, and deal with.
Oh, great heavens, Dahmer’s escaped the Netflix film studio again– How else would the documentary be made? I better call the F.B.I. How would someone say that? “Fibby?” Really? What a stupid name.
“Hey, Timmy; my son who I barely associate with or show any affection towards as doing so would, at least to me, feel like a death sentence to my entirely-cultivated and fragile front of masculinity. We live in the wonderful, unprecedented era of technological and societal advancement known as 1969. When Du Pont’s lead gasoline filled the air and children were hosed for protesting without care. Speaking of, it seems I have ingested so much of the former that my brain has restarted like our country’s hate for communists, and as I gaze upon the monochrome picture of our television set seeing Neil Armstrong set foot on the Final Frontier, I remember to thank the brainiacs over at N-A-S-A for making this all possible. God bless America, right, Timmy?”
See? No wonder the F.D.A had to outlaw lead gasoline, N-A-S-A sounds horrific. Maybe it has to do with what letters are being used.
F.F.A. and F.I.F.A.
Nope.
Wait, I think I know now.
Acronyms are pronounced phonetically if it has a vowel in the middle of it, therefore explaining the distinction between the aforementioned two.
M.I.A
Nevermind. But why? My job could have been considerably easier, this article could have ended right here, but the government just had to step in and ruin everything for me.
I sound like a conspiracy theorist.
H stands for Homonyms.
Forget the small questions; there are more pressing matters. Namely, how to pronounce G.I.F? Does the “G” have a “guh” or a “juh?” Truly a philosophical question of our time; we as a species should not have let Socractes die, as only a grand philosopher like him would be able to answer this question. The two sides of the debate are: “It is pronounced ‘Guh-I.F’ because the first letter stands for ‘graphics,’ not ‘jraffics!’” and “Duh! The pronunciation is ‘Juh-I.F’ because the creator of the format, Stephen Earl White, has used that pronunciation in the past!” No, both of you are wrong, I propose a third solution: the Graphics Interchange Format was originally developed as a readable image format for computers under the extension “.gif” and, as everyone who has used a computer knows, all file extensions, with absolutely no exceptions, are pronounced alphabetically. I will list off a few to prove my point: .png, .exe, .heic, .pdf, .jpeg.
U stands for Usage
There is another question that reveals more unsettling truths: what acronym goes before every website ever made? WWW is the answer. The issue is that nobody in the modern era actually says double-u, double-u, double-u. It is a mouthful. So, when one tells another the name of a website, the former always gives the name followed by the website’s suffix. This makes acronyms, as a whole, even more confusing and inconsistent.
All of that is without even getting into the issue of acronyms meaning multiple things across different spaces and groups. When I was in elementary school and started introducing myself to my classmates, I would say, confidently with a wide smile, “I have C.P.” It was an acronym that my mother made up for my disability, cerebral palsy; she was cool like that. Okay; great, wholesome even.
Fast-forward a couple of years and I am doing a project for my 5th grade class on said condition. I looked up the term “C.P” on my school Chromebook. Immediately, the school’s firewall flares up and I am presented with a screen stating, “Term blocked under the category ‘mature.’” Huh, weird. So, I went home, got on the family computer, went to Google, and entered the search term, “why is CP blocked?”
I learned something that day.
N stands for Nowledge [sic].
Without exposure to the acronym beforehand, many people will not know how to pronounce it. Seems a little redundant, right? With some fringe cases thrown into the mix, they might get the totally wrong idea. This makes acronyms incredibly confusing, especially longer or specialized ones, like D.W.I.S.N.W.I.D; do what I say, not what I do. Why on earth would somebody choose this acronym over saying the actual phrase?
C – Conclusion
Usually, I would refrain from writing this type of section, but I have a few closing thoughts to share with whoever reads these articles on this website. Thanks. That goes for everyone that contributes to the paper, even readers, as those are the people who keep this whole thing alive. Oh yeah, the editors! Almost forgot. They are as integral of a cog to this whole operation as anyone else, I guess.
