In a recent post, I did a brief critique of what I called Acronym Marketing. It was so brief that it may have looked like it came from ignorance. But in reality after reflecting on it, I think it comes from two places: cultural differences and due to their overuse in marketing (As someone said it succinctly: HLA. Humans Like Acronyms). I hereby announce my new four part series: AFS (Acronym Fatigue Series), where I will explore my acronym aversion for my readers enjoyment:
- This introduction where I explore why I’m wary of acronyms
- Part 1: CAP, ACID – Why I’m wary even of formally sound acronyms
- Part 2: DRY, KISS – Why I’m wary of well meaning advice acronyms
- Part 3: OLAP vs OLTP, ELT vs ETL – Why I’m wary of acronyms pushing technical dichotomies
First and foremost it comes from having a different cultural background. While we do have acronyms at home, they are not as ubiquitous as in English. We use them for institutions and also as abbreviations, but we have very few acronyms. While english has ASAP, BRB, TLDR, AFK, TGIF, LOL, ROFL, and so many more, in Spanish from the top of my head I can only recall TQM (“Te quiero mucho”, I haven’t used this since MSN), NTP (“No te preocupes”, first heard this last year), PQ/XQ (“Por qué/porque”, maybe used to text faster but nowadays I’ve only seen my dad use it).
On the other hand, my introduction to academia was specialized in the humanities, specifically History, but also in other related disciplines, and a bit of philosophy. There, I rarely read acronyms as tools to pack complex concepts and ideas. You don’t see Kant writing TCI instead of “The Categorical Imperative” or Rousseau writing TSC instead of “The Social Contract”. You usually see the creation of concepts (Biopolitics by Foucault, Zeitgeist by Herder, Orientalism by Said) or the use of nominalization. This is not to say that these concept packing techniques are not used in Software Engineering. It’s just that acronyms are way less used in the humanities, most probably because of the linguistically diversity in each discipline, while in Computer Science english is the default language for everything.
Note: This is just a thought, less than a thesis, or even a hipothesis. I have no formal proof that acronyms are actually more prevalent in English. Here’s a chart ChatGPT made for me based on this study’s dataset (MACRONYM, 2022).
Having explained why I’m not particularly prone to acronyms by default, I hope the reader can also notice the opposite phenomenon: people (specially native-english speakers) like acronyms. Even in memes, acronyms spread like fire.
Note: This is not a criticism of the acronyms themselves (yet). It’s just shedding light into the use of acronyms in marketing to push products.
In part this is because acronyms are a way of in-group signalling. On the one hand if you find an unknown acronym in the wild, you are left lost until you find a definition elsewere. But if you understand them, you are left with a sense of feeling as part of the group. This is exploited in tech marketing as a way to signal they are part of the group, and it works! I don’t blame them. In a previous job, marketing spammed so many Cyber intelligence and Cybersecurity acronyms that I doubt any engineering individual contributor in the company was able to define them all. Every new Epic brought its new family of acronyms, some even invented inhouse.
Ideas don’t always replicate on their own merit. Ideas specifically abreviated in acronyms are memetic by default, specially well-crafted ones like SOLID (SOLID. isn’t. solid). So when I come across famous acronyms that are spread all over in technical discussions, a part of me always remembers that a tiny reason for that is they are acronyms in the first place.