You can interpret it that way, if you want. However, that wasn’t really what I had in mind. Just pointing out that Americans seem to love acronyms so much that it gets completely ridiculous at times. In highly technical contexts it makes sense when you’re writing documentation or articles for a very small audience.
For instance, you can shorten Green House Gasses to GHGs if you’re audience consists of climate scientists, but don’t expect the general public to know that acronym. Go ahead and shorten Volatile Organic Compounds to VOCs if you’re writing to chemists. You can talk about CMB when talking to geologists and FFPs when talking to cosmologists, but people outside those fiels probably have never heard of these things let alone the acronyms.
In normal every day situations it just doesn’t make sense, because you can’t realistically expect everyone to know all of these thousands of accornyms for thousands of more or less common items, situations and things in life.
Generally speaking, it’s a good practice to do it exactly the way you just did. It’s just that certain acronyms have already been taken. Well, technically all of them have already been taken, but some are obscure while others are familiar to the general public.
If your new acronym collides with something obscure like CMB, then who cares (apart from geologists). If you end up using somethign more familiar ones such as USB, BMW or HTC, you’re going to run into some issues. However, it migh be fun to write an article and really mess with the reader by forcing as many acronym collisions as possible.
Americans are so funny, because literally everything has to have an abbreviation.
Woah there, did you just call me American?
You can interpret it that way, if you want. However, that wasn’t really what I had in mind. Just pointing out that Americans seem to love acronyms so much that it gets completely ridiculous at times. In highly technical contexts it makes sense when you’re writing documentation or articles for a very small audience.
For instance, you can shorten Green House Gasses to GHGs if you’re audience consists of climate scientists, but don’t expect the general public to know that acronym. Go ahead and shorten Volatile Organic Compounds to VOCs if you’re writing to chemists. You can talk about CMB when talking to geologists and FFPs when talking to cosmologists, but people outside those fiels probably have never heard of these things let alone the acronyms.
In normal every day situations it just doesn’t make sense, because you can’t realistically expect everyone to know all of these thousands of accornyms for thousands of more or less common items, situations and things in life.
So, like using SS only after having used stainless steel directly and still being in the same context?
Generally speaking, it’s a good practice to do it exactly the way you just did. It’s just that certain acronyms have already been taken. Well, technically all of them have already been taken, but some are obscure while others are familiar to the general public.
If your new acronym collides with something obscure like CMB, then who cares (apart from geologists). If you end up using somethign more familiar ones such as USB, BMW or HTC, you’re going to run into some issues. However, it migh be fun to write an article and really mess with the reader by forcing as many acronym collisions as possible.