andrel's Journal: In defense of acronyms

Acronyms tend to have a bad reputation. This is a shame, because they're a vital and rich part of the language.

Let me be clear about what an acronym is. Acronyms are abbreviations that are pronounced as words. The usual examples are NATO (North-Atlantic Treaty Organization) and Nabisco (National Biscuit Company).

Abbreviations that are pronounced by saying the letters are not acronyms, even though advocates of sloppy vocabulary sometimes claim they are. Examples of non-acronyms include IBM (International Business Machines) and IRS (Internal Revenue Service). While such non-pronounceable abbreviations are mildly useful in writing, where they make journal articles shorter, they are unnatural in speech, where they occasionally make things longer. An extreme case is the nine syllable WWW instead of the three syllable "world wide web".

There's a lot of physics in the phrase "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation", but we all know what a LASER is. Most of us write it laser. That's one of the major advantages of acronyms over other forms of abbreviation -- they can join the language as words. Acronyms provide a strategy for creating new words. This is especially important in technical fields where discussing complicated ideas necessitates words to describe those ideas.

Don't you wish statisticians used something better than the confusing "Type I" and "Type II" when talking about error rates? I always have to think about the difference. Even "sensitivity" and "specificity", the dreadful vocabulary physicians use, are better. But I never confuse "false alarm" with "false negative", which is how radar (yay two-syllable acronym) engineers talk about the same concepts. (A sure sign of serious vocabulary problems is someone touting the improvement double-negatives like "false negative" will bring. For the record, I prefer "failure to detect".)

I conjecture that acronyms are processed by the same part of the brain as words, whereas a different part of the brain handles non-pronounceable abbreviations. There may also be a difference between reading and listening. This wouldn't be hard to test using brain-imaging techniques such as PET (yay one-syllable acronym) or fMRI (boo four-syllable abbreviation). Disclaimer: I'm an imaging guy, but am ignorant about the brain itself. This may be a ridiculous conjecture. I know several linguists and psychologists who use fMRI to study language cognition; must remember to ask.

Who uses nine?

[Sebbo]

"Wubwubwub."

Re:Who uses nine?

[andrel]

The NPR announcers.