Avoid these awesomely bad acronyms (ABAs)

A handful for your collection

J.P. Beaumont, a character in J.A. Jance’s Partner in Crime, tells this story:

Avoid these awesomely bad acronyms — *Image by gorica*

‘So SHIT it was, and SHIT it remains’: What happens when acronyms go wrong?

The world we live in is made up of shortcuts and acronyms — the Seattle PD, the U.S. of A., the U Dub, et cetera. The AG’s (see what I mean?) Special Homicide Investigation Team had barely opened its doors for business when people started shortening the name to something a little more manageable.

And that’s where the SHIT hit the fan, so to speak. While everyone agrees the name is ‘regrettable’ and ‘unfortunate,’ no one in the state bureaucracy is willing to take the heat for rescinding that previously placed order for preprinted stationery, forms and business cards. So SHIT it was, and SHIT it remains.

The idea that an organizational program might be named after excrement hardly screams fiction. One of my clients swears that someone in her shop named a company program only to change the appellation when the acronym turned out to spell FECES.

When words collide

A participant in one of my webinars shares an acronym that “sounds bad to me but probably sounds fine to everyone else.” That’s NEP, for her organization’s nutrition and exercise physiology program.

“I’m originally from the Netherlands, and the word ‘nep’ in Dutch means fake,” she writes. “So when I see them writing about the achievements of the ‘fake’ program, it just doesn’t sound right.”

No, it wouldn’t.

World’s worst acronyms

Noah Shachtman, a contributing editor at Wired magazine, collects the “Most Awesomely Bad Military Acronyms Ever (MAMAs, for short).” Among them:

C-SMURF: Consequence Management Response Force
ÉCLAIR: Extensible Contr Lang for Adv Info LRetr
LOCO: Local Control of Chemistry
MARVEL: Modeling Adversary Reactions, Validating Experiment Limitations
PENGWUN: Protocol Emulation for Next Generation Wireless Networks
PAWPRNT: Progressive Advanced Wideband Processor/Real-Time Net-Centric Tracker

When acronyms congregate

It’s not necessarily any one acronym, but a collection of them that makes your eyes glaze over. David Harris Lewis, one of my favorite correspondents, sent me this headline and deck “for your collection of truly bad headlines”:

XPS – Accelerate your ROI in EWM through native SAP small parcel and LTL shipping

Announcing Catalyst SAP Supply Chain Management Webinar Series!

“Now, where was I?” Dave writes. “Oh, yeah, managing my supply chain.”

Make up your own acronyms.

When the SHIT and FECES start to fly, some of my friends at FedEx start making up their own acronyms. They’ll mention TLA and FLAW and watch their colleagues try to puzzle out what they mean.

Those acronyms, of course, stand for three-letter acronym and four-letter acronym word.

What words will resonate with your readers?
Jargon. Buzzwords. Acronyms. They’re things that make your reader go “huh?” And we need to get them out of our message.
Learn how to translate the language of your organization into the language of your readers at Rev Up Readability — our tight-writing workshop starting Feb. 22.
There, you’ll learn how to define terms the reader-friendly way (Hint: It’s not the way you learned in Journalism 101.) How to steal techniques from Warren Buffett to make complex technical information easier to understand — and more fun to read. Plus: you’ll boost social media reach and influence, media coverage and your organization’s authority.
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