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Working in the computer industry you develop a habit of talking in acronyms. I’ve often found it amusing how the acronym over time becomes the proper name for the thing it identifies–that there come to be a set of people who know the acronym and the thing it identifies, but who don’t know what the acronym is a short form of.
This isn’t just the ones that have no consistent answer, like DVD, or the geek joke ones like GNU, it’s even things like IBM or SQL. I hear this all the time with HTML and XML. I find it fascinating.
I bet all the guys I play poker with would know whether or not to buy and IDE or SATA
And, of course, you see this all the time in popular culture. How long until no one remembers that KFC is an acronym?
It’s one of my weird pedantic quirks that I’ve always prided myself on understanding the full forms of acronyms, in the same way I pride myself on understanding the etymology and usage history of the words and phrases in my vocabulary. There apparently was a point in time when I started to care, and before that point I just accepted acronyms at face value.
I realize this because in an article on dead media that I read this morning, I found that VHS stands for “Vertical Helical Scan”, and in reading that I became aware that not only had I not known that, but that I had never once considered VHS as an acronym, or that it might have meant something. It was just a product label.
I wonder how many other blind spots like that I have.