We are Drowning in Acronyms, LOL
By Dan Brown Have you heard about Donald Trump’s OBBB? Apparently the signature legislation from POTUS may be DOA in the Senate because some legislators object to the SALT and SNAP provisions. If you read those sentences without thinking “WTF?” then you, my friend, have adjusted to life in the Age of the Acronym. Or TAOTA for short. I just made that up. The things are everywhere. You can’t get through the day without running into at least a few of them. If you drive a car, you worry about how many MPG it gets. They also stand for institutions like banks – think TD and BMO. Other acronyms represent such media outlets as CTV, CNN, ABC, and MSNBC. They even stand for people – one of Trump’s most vocal critics is AOC. And apparently RFK’s goal is to MAHA. An early adopter were the four Swedes in the band ABBA. Back then, in the 1970s, acronyms were relatively rare – and fun. They still had some weight because they were found only in a specialized context. The members of the generation growing up back then encountered words like NASA and SCUBA. If you knew what the letters stood for, you belonged to a segment of the population that was educated. Since those days, they’ve multiplied faster than rabbits. You can now find them in every situation. As a 2022 movie’s title indicates, they are EEAAO. In the entertainment sphere, we went from mellow AOR sounds to NWA over the decades. Heck, there was even an X-rated song in the pandemic years titled WAP (you might not wanna look that one up). Another early adopter was the RPG industry, which included the makers of D&D. They have given us terminology like NPC that has now migrated to video games – think WOW or COD, among the more popular titles. They once served a clear purpose. Since the tendency of language is to become more efficient, they made communications faster. Then they really took off when the internet and texting became the dominant ways of getting a message across. LOL. But what’s not funny is how, unfortunately, bureaucrats also seized on them as a way to hide meaning rather than make things clearer. KIA and MIA are anodyne terms that mask a much darker reality, although there was something poetic about CREEP, it was the perfect contraction to describe Richard Nixon’s re-election effort. We’re at the point where a lot of reverse-engineering goes on, too. Some minor government official or political professional will choose a pre-existing word, then come up with the words it stands for, not the other way around. An early example of this was the agency SHIELD in the Marvel Comics of yesteryear. Yes, we rely on acronyms too much. How bad is the situation? It’s gotten to the point where we are now recycling old acronyms, for example POS, which stands for at least three different sets of words that I know of. Our lives are now full of FOMO because we don’t want to miss out on events like a BOGO sale. But hey, let’s face it, it’s not always WYSIWYG. If you don’t mind, I will take a pause RN. I don’t want to get too PO’d. I’ll BRB! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
