Acronyms should be outlawed

[Chris Padilla]

Some legitimate words have come from acronyms:

Laser: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
Radar: RAdio Detection And Ranging

http://www.acronymfinder.com/

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=78002

[Dave Lehnert]

I am a shopsmith user and get confused when I see a question like "Help with a SS" For years that was a ShopSmith. Now It's a SawStop.

[John Schreiber]

This thread reminds me of George Orwell's 1984. Acronyms = New Speak?

Orwell has a great article on Political Communication. Political communication does not have an information component. It is intended to persuade without use of facts.

Just listen, politicians can talk for hours and never really say anything.

[Mike Armstrong]

Ya better get used to it. . . OGGW (only gonna get worse).

Exactly! Good English and grammar are on the way out. Yesterday, I just heard about "inventive spelling" from my daughter. What a crock . . .

The idea is to let kids write and ignore their spelling/grammar issues so you won't stifle their interest in writing. The theory is that they can learn the correct spelling/grammar later. Yeah, right.

When I read some of the Wikipedia page about it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_spelling - I wanted to gag:
". . . Because knowledge is cultural, there are no right answers. . ." and ". . .These spellings are neither right nor wrong; they reflect the child's development as a speller. . ."

Mike

[Art Mulder]

I've been doing this Navy stuff for 37 years...I know most of them...but the other day I went to a very high level security brief...and I still have no clue what the presenter was saying. They have their own...that are so secret...nobody can ask what they mean.

I've heard that NASA and the Military both have recursive acronyms. Now that would take some getting used to.

But frankly, acronyms never bothered me much. Now marketing speak... there was a time when I wanted to scream every time I heard one of them talk about "drilling down" into an issue. Argh. Then there is the way the gov't would regularly refer to us as "consumers". Err, no, I'm a person, a citizen.

but I'm getting too serious for this thread.
Sorry. IMHO. YMMV. TTFN!

...art

[Tom Veatch]

Exactly! Good English and grammar are on the way out. Yesterday, I just heard about "inventive spelling" from my daughter. What a crock . . ....

I always though the intended result of writing was to foster communication. But to achieve communication, you have to communicate. That implies some sort of standardization of the symbols so everyone both recognizes the symbol and understands it's meaning. Not much communication results when you have to puzzle out what symbol (word) the writer intended. You could be fluent in spoken Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc., but if you can't decipher the Kanjii symbols, you're not going to be able to read it very well.

"Inventive spelling" seems to me to be somewhat analogous to everyone with a radio using "inventive frequency" selection. The end result doesn't contain a lot of communication.

[Jim Becker]

Hey....I just couldn't get through the day without a few TLAs and FLAs thrown in. (Three Letter Acronyms and Four Letter Acronyms...) :

And yes, the telecom industry loves it's acronyms. When you combine the various "technical" ones (often with multiple meanings) with all the wonderful internal ones for processes and departments, etc., it gets REAL interesting.... especially on weeks like this when I'm being subjected to "Death By Conference Call"...

[Dennis Peacock]

Hey....I just couldn't get through the day without a few TLAs and FLAs thrown in. (Three Letter Acronyms and Four Letter Acronyms...) :

And yes, the telecom industry loves it's acronyms. When you combine the various "technical" ones (often with multiple meanings) with all the wonderful internal ones for processes and departments, etc., it gets REAL interesting.... especially on weeks like this when I'm being subjected to "Death By Conference Call"...

The IT industry has so many acronyms that it's a language all on it's own. '

Death By Conference Call.......ROFL!!!!!!!! Good One!!!!!!!!

[larry cronkite]

I always though the intended result of writing was to foster communication. But to achieve communication, you have to communicate. That implies some sort of standardization of the symbols so everyone both recognizes the symbol and understands it's meaning. Not much communication results when you have to puzzle out what symbol (word) the writer intended. You could be fluent in spoken Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc., but if you can't decipher the Kanjii symbols, you're not going to be able to read it very well.

"Inventive spelling" seems to me to be somewhat analogous to everyone with a radio using "inventive frequency" selection. The end result doesn't contain a lot of communication.

Inventive spelling is as bad as inventive punctuation. Many don't know the correct use of "it's."
The apostrophe indicates a missing letter, not a possessive.
Whenever in doubt say "it is" instead of "it's" and if it doesn't sound right - it isn't.

[Jim Becker]

Death By Conference Call.......ROFL!!!!!!!! Good One!!!!!!!!

Well look at this (Blurred) screen scrape of my week. Any place you see yellow is a conference call. Any place you don't see yellow also probably had me on the phone for incoming calls as well as some calls I initiated.

Death-By-Conference-Call.jpg

I used to chuckle about "death by PowerPoint" which most of us in business know all about...presentations with too many boring slides that the presenter insists in reading completely including the fine print. That's been eclipsed in my world now by a conference call in my left ear (the one I can actually hear with), several IM sessions on the right side of the screen and email on the left. Oh, and then there is the other computer... Thank goodness for wireless headsets with mute buttons. I can only "hold it" so long...

[Justin Leiwig]

I used to chuckle about "death by PowerPoint" which most of us in business know all about...presentations with too many boring slides that the presenter insists in reading completely including the fine print.

We insist that my boss gets paid by the slide here at work. But that's government for you.


You should try deciphering between federal,state, and county acronyms all at once if you think the military is bad. I need a cross reference guide some days when the old brain is working up to par!

[Tom Veatch]

Inventive spelling is as bad as inventive punctuation. Many don't know the correct use of "it's."
The apostrophe indicates a missing letter, not a possessive.
Whenever in doubt say "it is" instead of "it's" and if it doesn't sound right - it isn't.

Hmmmm ... pushed a button, did I?

But you are correct. The "its" possessive form is one of the exceptions (Rules 9/10 in the link) to the general rule of adding " 's " to form the possessive (Rule 2). (But "its" still don't look right.)

http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp

[Mike Cutler]

Exactly! Good English and grammar are on the way out. Yesterday, I just heard about "inventive spelling" from my daughter. What a crock . . .

The idea is to let kids write and ignore their spelling/grammar issues so you won't stifle their interest in writing. The theory is that they can learn the correct spelling/grammar later. Yeah, right.

When I read some of the Wikipedia page about it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_spelling - I wanted to gag:
". . . Because knowledge is cultural, there are no right answers. . ." and ". . .These spellings are neither right nor wrong; they reflect the child's development as a speller. . ."

Mike

Some school systems tried this years ago. The only quantifiable result was that SAT scores went into the toilet.
I can't believe it's circling back.

[Jim Becker]

Mike and Mike, for some kids, it's actually necessary to take the "lax" spelling approach. My older daughter is a prime example. She has a language based learning disability, yet is a somewhat avid and talented writer. Even though she's going into 7th grade, both we and the school are more inclined to encourage the reading and writing, despite her inability to understand the complicated spelling rules for English. Otherwise, she'll never be able to do the work. She was able to mask this problem somewhat in Russia since everything is completely phonetic under Cyrillic, although not completely. In English, spelling requires too many exceptions and rules, etc., for her.

[Mike Cutler]

Jim

There will always be exceptions in any school, or school system. That your daughters are able to function and communicate in the short time they've been in America is simply amazing to me.
The direction, and intent, in my post was to point out some of the short term,and long term ramifications of adopting the "inventive spelling" as a general curriculum for an entire school system.

Apologies if it appeared that I was singling out any particular group. It certainly was not my intent . Anything that gets kids to read and write is a plus in my book. I don't care if they're reading comic books and Sports Illustrated.
Eventually, by association, they'll be able to apply what they've been introduced to in a more disciplined format. I'm certain that your daughter will pick up the rules by example and begin to apply them in her own fashion.

There are a lot of rules in english as spoken in America. We take so much from other languages that we almost have our own language.
I really wish I'd paid more attention in english class as a kid.