Acronymish

Since moving to Huntsville I have the odd sensation of living in a foreign country where my knowledge of the language spoken is limited to a few phrases recalled from a high school foreign language course. Because, like many of you, I now work with the government. Which means I have been introduced to the government’s very own variation of the English language based almost entirely on endless strings of acronyms.

Like a tourist, I consult on a regular basis the Acronym-to-English guide (AEG) the government has thoughtfully provided. Using acronyms is supposed to streamline our communication. But more often than not you don’t know what the acronym stands for, which means you have to ask. And finding out what it stands for doesn’t necessarily clear things up.

But my natural inclination to blame the government for my difficulty assimilating to Acronymish isn’t entirely fair. This language conversion isn’t limited to the government; they’ve simply perfected the art form. Financial institutions, technology, healthcare – they all rely on acronym shortcuts designed solely to confuse the masses (CTM). The reason it takes the masses so long to realize they’ve been violated is because companies shield their illegal activities with a barrage of acronyms. By the time we’ve looked up WPTSAYM - JSH in the AEG to discover it means “We plan to steal all your money - just sign here,” it’s too late. And it’s not like they weren’t honest and upfront about it. If they had warned us in French, we’d still be held responsible for the consequences, right?

Despite the potential for harm, we go along with all these acronyms because we as a culture have become so lazy we can’t be bothered to verbalize whole words anymore. We use acronyms so seamlessly in our everyday conversations that we’ve forgotten that the acronyms actually stand for anything. If someone asked me to pick up a Digital Versatile Disk on my way home from work, I wouldn’t have a clue where to go for one.

Like cavemen who used one simple stick drawing to mean “I went hunting for seven days and killed this antelope by stabbing him with my spear. And wouldn’t you know it? I got a splinter,” we are regressing to the point where we are able to convey a complex thought process with just a few simple letters. Contrarily, if we take too long to convey our meaning, or share something nobody wants to hear, it’s TMI. Then again, it could just be that you have ADD and any I is TMI.

Computerized communication, more than the government, will be the ultimate force behind converting English into a language made up entirely of acronyms. My young nieces and nephews consider me ridiculously old fashioned because I use complete sentences in IM, while the messages they send me are completely incomprehensible jumbles of symbols, letters, numbers and emoticons. I should probably ask them to decipher the government documents I am struggling with at work; it is in, after all, their language. By the time their generation is running this country, speaking whole words and sentences will be as embarrassing to them as when our grandparents spoke the language of the “old country.”

But like my grandparents who continued throughout their lives to speak a mixture of English and German, no matter how much I try to assimilate to the new culture, I’m sure I will intermittently throw in an old-fashioned fully formed word now and then. I won’t be able to help it. It was the language of my people.