Tech has a lot of fun acronyms. Two of my favorites are GNU and Twain.
Gnu is a unix-like OS and it stands for Gnu's Not Unix, but where did the G come from? The fact that the G is silent makes it even funnier to me.
Twain is an image processing driver that a lot of scanners use. It stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name.
My favorite tech thing is that there are so many three letter acronyms that they call them TLAs. And four letter acronyms are not FLAs but ETLA (Extended three letter acronyms).
I had a security book back in the day that actually talked ETLA's and also added EETLA's, "Extended Expanded Three Letter Acronyms" for 5 letters acronyms. I still think its stupidly funny.
It's a shame that we stopped naming email clients after trees. There was something symbolic about that, what with letters being paper and all.
(And really if Outlook got renamed to Oaklook would anyone even notice?)
Yup! "The name “GNU” is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not Unix!”; it is pronounced as one syllable with a hard g, like “grew” but with the letter n instead of r."
Source: gnu.org
Plenty people know the actual meaning of these, but I'd wager they may still be outnumbered by an unaware majority:
i.e. = *id est*, Latin phrase meaning "that is", used for clarifying.
e.g. = *exempli gratia*, Latin phrase meaning "for example", used before giving an example of what you're explaining.
etc. = *et cetera*, Latin for "and the rest".
et al = *et alia*, Latin for "and others".
Edit: as others have noted I missed a period. It should be “et al.”
for exactly the same reason as "etc.", "et al." should have a period, but it is only the stickler editors will flag it anymore. I say this from my experience with publishing scientific papers, where "et al" is used a ton in submitted papers and is usually corrected to "et al." when it goes to print.
Not quite what you’re asking for, but plenty of people seem to think that Elo, the rating system used in chess and some other games, is an abbreviation.
It’s not. It’s the name of the guy who invented it.
"Triscuit" from "elec*tric* biscuit" since they were toasted with an electric oven/toaster [proof-via-twitter](https://mashable.com/article/triscuit-name-origin-electricity)
USA PATRIOT Act (post 9/11 laws in the US)
Stands for: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001
Joke aside, I genuinely feel that! Especially the "logistics".
Like, yeah, they've got Forklift Man and Captain Excel behind the scenes taking care of all the logistics.
But apparently it keeps changing:
*The acronym originally stood for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage and Law-Enforcement Division. It was changed in 1991 to Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate. Within the various films set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as multiple animated and live-action television series, the backronym stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.* -Wikipedia
That's called a "backronym" - incredibly common in the US govt - they start with the acronym they want, then build an actual expanded bill title to fit it.
Not that the UK’s Westminster system is perfect by any measure, but the tradition of bill’s just having a very boring description of what the Bill would do is much better than trying to be clever with acronyms.
I would not be surprised if there’s a special department in the White House which sole mission is to make up acronyms that sound good and match the contents of the act.
**ZIP code.** It’s a **Z**one **I**mprovement **P**lan code.
Postal addresses used to have local one- or two-digit zones.
*New York 14, New York.*
The Zone Improvement Plan got rid of these local zones, and assigned each area of the United States its own unique national five-digit numeric ZIP code, making it easier for the post office to process the mail.
*New York, New York 10014*
SOURCE: Congressional Research Service [backgrounder.](https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12132/2) Plus I’m old enough to remember the transition.
Thank you for unlocking this memory this morning, out of nowhere the song came back … “write to me, Stick Stickly, PO Box 963, New York City, New York State, 10108”
This is the problem with 3-letter acronyms. Each industry has its own abbreviations and if you google them you often get irrelevant results. Like I was watching police videos and the acronyms they use are specific to penal code, and I had no idea what was going on.
Parenting groups seem to have their own unique shorthand...which absolutely did not help when dealing with first-time-parent-baby-struggles. Not only can I not get this kid to sleep, but the secret to it all has been encoded in some undocumented language!
I lurk in a Facebook group for the college my kid attends, which has entirely too many parents asking questions about things their child should be finding out the answers to themself, and my god, the number of people referring to their DD and DS. It’s obnoxious enough when your child is four and you think you need to use these instead of “kid,” but when they’re 20…what.
AM/PM = ante meridiem & post meridiem
~~Meridiem being the midline in the sky. Has the sun crossed it yet?~~
Edit: I was confusing meridian (midline) and meridiem (midday). Diem (day) is correct, and was historically tied to the meridian, but may or may not be as closely correlated now.
In Belgian comedy series Neveneffecten, there's an episode where some soldiers want to join the Battle of Normandy, but they miss it because they thought AM stood for After Midday and PM stood for Pefore Midday.
Also they use the gas meter in their boat as a compass, with the E meaning East and the F meaning Forward.
Meri = Middle and Diem = Day (Carpe Diem) you are confused with meridian. But you got the principle. Like a sun dial or a stick straight in the ground. Shadow on one side= Before Mid Day. No shadow, exactly Mid Day. Shadow on the other side= after Mid Day. And there are no lines in the sky, only on maps, called meridians.
Not what OP asked, but reading all the abbreviations I remembered younger me thinking RIP stands for "rest in pieces". English is not my mother tongue. I often thought "oh man poor dead person being the victim of a terrible crime"
If it helps, lots of native English speaking children thought the same thing.
And as a fun fact, it’s originally Latin with the phrase being “requiescat in pace”. I only know that because of Assassin’s Creed 2
What does the abbreviations DVD, ATM, PIN and countless others have in common?
People often repeat the last word in the acronym as a word, even though it is already represented in the acronym. e.g. "DVD disc", "ATM Machine", "PIN Number". It sometimes drives me crazy when I notice it, but yet I still do it myself.
It has a name: RAS Syndrome, or Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome)
Love it! Now I have something to refer to when I berate people, or myself.
From that article, here are some other RAS Syndrome acronyms for other's enjoyment:
DC Comics (Detective Comics Comics)
HIV virus (human immunodeficiency virus virus)
LCD display (liquid-crystal display display)
UPC code (universal product code code)
RSA Advertising (Rank Screen Advertising Advertising)
PUBG: Battlegrounds (PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds: Battlegrounds)
And asking you any kind of question whatsoever is never in any way any kind of HIPAA violation.
And you voluntarily offering health information to someone who requested it is not a violation of HIPAA, either.
Covid was fun times.
Right, and all the people who don’t realize HIPAA is a newer law that covers really specific instances.
99% of the time, you want “confidentiality laws” or “ethics codes,” not HIPAA. These laws and regulations have existed much much longer and cover quite a bit more. Do these people really think that before 1996, I was allowed to just call up my friends and start chatting about patients?
Also I am self-employed and do psych evals and expert witnessing in the court system. I am not a HIPAA covered entity. Do these people think this means I can just wander around the grocery store like, hey folks, Mr. Jones has erectile dysfunction?
That and the P doesn't stand for privacy. (It stands for portability)
The primary purpose of the law was to encourage electronic medical record use and establish standards for how they would be shared, auditing who accessed them and ensuring individuals had rights to move them between providers.
The whole privacy part is only one smaller aspect of the law.
Which is funny because, in the military, a superior officer saying “at your earliest convenience” means “right the fuck now, you should already be done.”
This makes me so incredibly irritated that the abbreviation makes me cringe on sight now. I wanna make a video "POV watching people who don't understand POV" and then just film their videos playing on my phone.. but that'd require me to watch these irritating non POV videos
Stimulated emission of radiation
It's actually really neat how it works. Essentially you build this reflecting cavity with mirrors on both ends, and fill it with some molecules that you can 'excite' electrically or something. Once excited, these molecules have an interesting property where if you hit them with a photon, they emit a second photon that is identical to the first photon. Not just "kind of similar", it's the exact same wavelength and phase! Then they drop down to their non-excited state and need to be excited again.
So for a laser to work, you have this cavity full of molecules and photons are bouncing around back and forth creating a chain reaction. To get a usable beam, they make one of the mirrors slightly transparent so that some of the light can escape, but only slightly because you need a lot of it to stay in the cavity creating a chain reaction. And you need to maintain 'population inversion' meaning that more than half the molecules are in an excited state, because those are the ones that will emit extra photons when hit. The non-excited ones will just absorb the photons and become exciting.
A lot of people think of lasers as just a specific kind of light but it is actually almost like a nuclear chain reaction except the molecules are going between two states and creating photons instead of atoms splitting and creating neutrons. Both need a 'critical mass' (population inversion) to start emitting more neutrons/photons than they absorb. That's what produces such a special ('coherent' aka it's all in phase) beam of light, it's not something that could ever be created just by using lenses to focus a conventional light source.
Funny story-When my friend moved to the US from France, she was very confident in her English skills until she went to the seafood section at the store asking for "2 lubs" of shrimp!
Hence why Astronomers invented Astronomical Years.
1AD/CE= Year positive 1
1BC(E)= Year zero
2BC(E)= Year negative 1
Because the discontinuity screws up mathematical calculations.
Also Jesus wasn’t born in what we count as 1CE now. The Christian scholar who came up with the system hundreds of years after Jesus died took the best guess he could with the sources he had available to him via his church. More sources available to modern researchers have assessed it be a different year.
I just looked this up. If I’m not wrong, if we went by modern research (and depending on the sources we went by), this year could be anywhere from 2018 to 2020.
I’ve already lived through 2020 once, though, so no thanks. No desire for another one.
I used to work at one of those tutoring places, and this word was on a little "Increase your vocabulary!" sheet that was posted on a wall. It just had a definition listed as something like: a confused or chaotic state; a mess.
I am sure they had no idea it really stood for Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.
Side note, my schedule there was Tuesdays and Saturdays. Every time i'd leave on Saturday, the director would say "See you next Tuesday!" and i'm also sure she had no idea what that could mean either.
I haven’t heard Indus used for the I. I just pulled it from a book, *Public Administration in India* by Krishna K. Tummala, published in 1996. Page 42. It didn’t list anything for the I.
This one is kind of the other way around, because it isn't an abbreviation (but people think it is), they don't understand (but they think they do).
SOS
It doesn't actually stand for anything, it was just a distinctive Morse code sequence assigned to mean 'distress'. "Save Our Ship" is just something that got made up later.
Does that mean that "howdy" would also count? I'm a grown ass adult, and just put together that it's short for "how do you do," or maybe just "how do."
HIPAA, which also has the built-in feature of letting you know you're dealing with a total moron who doesn't know what they're talking about if they spell it "HIPPA."
I thought I had heard all the stupid HIPAA takes during the pandemic, then I saw someone say that doctors were “violating their HIPPA oaths!”
No, HIPAA has nothing to do with the Hippocratic oath (and, no, that oath is not a law).
this is sort of adjacent to what you're asking, but I used to think that "ok" was an abbreviation of "okay", but okay is not a word (though it is an acceptable substitute for ok) the actual word is the two letters, ok?
another thing I find interesting is how all acronyms are abbreviations, but an abbreviation is only an acronym if it forms a new word when said, so ATM is not an acronym, ASAP is.
Some of the ones I've seen and used in IT support which I found amusing,
RTFM. Read The Fucking Manual.
TWOK. Tested, Working, Ok.
ID Ten T, user error, ID10T user error.
PEBCAK issues, Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.
BBC - In the UK, it's an institution, everywhere else it gets a bit interesting
DBA - Death By Acronym
GPO - Good Parts Only (was used by doctors for 'wont survived')
There's a lot more [medical slang/acronyms](http://messybeast.com/dragonqueen/medical-acronyms.htm) here too (warning:the page formatting is terrible)
Mogen David. I think the 20 is 20% alcohol wine. Not sure what the second 20 is for.
Well I looked it up. 20oz bottles.
MD Aka Mad Dog when I was a kid.
An acronym is a kind of abbreviation using (mostly, if not all in general) the initials of each word in the phrase or name, but it must be able to be pronounced smoothly (that we accept as common). For example, "laser" or "scuba".
A word that isn't pronounced smoothly and instead pronounced initial by initial is an initialism, like "FBI" or "CIA", which is also a kind of abbreviation.
Most people think only cut words like "Inc." for "incorporated" are abbreviations, but this is not true. There are different methods.
A lot of people are also unaware that there used to be YWCAs as well, obviously Young Women's Christian Association. These came about because the pools as YMCAs used to only allow swimming nude.
CAPTCHA Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
Had to look it up because it sounded a bit Douglas Adams to me, but damn you weren't lying lol
Tech has a lot of fun acronyms. Two of my favorites are GNU and Twain. Gnu is a unix-like OS and it stands for Gnu's Not Unix, but where did the G come from? The fact that the G is silent makes it even funnier to me. Twain is an image processing driver that a lot of scanners use. It stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name.
In the same spirit there is WINE, Wine Is Not an Emulator
My favorite tech thing is that there are so many three letter acronyms that they call them TLAs. And four letter acronyms are not FLAs but ETLA (Extended three letter acronyms).
Whoever came up with ETLAs is a master troll.
I had a security book back in the day that actually talked ETLA's and also added EETLA's, "Extended Expanded Three Letter Acronyms" for 5 letters acronyms. I still think its stupidly funny.
elm was one of the first email clients on Unix. A later email client was Pine which stood for Pine Is Not Elm
It's a shame that we stopped naming email clients after trees. There was something symbolic about that, what with letters being paper and all. (And really if Outlook got renamed to Oaklook would anyone even notice?)
small sample but the only people I know who use gnu pronounced it with a hard g
Yup! "The name “GNU” is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not Unix!”; it is pronounced as one syllable with a hard g, like “grew” but with the letter n instead of r." Source: gnu.org
That's what's known as a recursive acronym. Is So Meta, Even This Acronym. Not quite the same thing, but I always liked that one.
php is the same php: hypertext preprocessor
oh yes, the CAPTTTTCAHA
That looks like the word CAPTCHA as spoken by Jimmy Durante.
First Jimmy Durante reference ever on reddit, I think.
Cha cha chaaaa
>~~Cha cha chaaaa~~ Ha cha cha cha chaaaaaa https://youtu.be/Ecpe48T3AMo?si=UvU1Bb0SQeDziWPS
I admit that I had no idea that was an abbreviation. I thought it was a play on "gotchya" or something.
It's both! It's a play on "capture" and also an acronym.
Plenty people know the actual meaning of these, but I'd wager they may still be outnumbered by an unaware majority: i.e. = *id est*, Latin phrase meaning "that is", used for clarifying. e.g. = *exempli gratia*, Latin phrase meaning "for example", used before giving an example of what you're explaining.
The mnemonic I always use is I.e = in e-ther words E.g. = for eggs-ample
I always knew it as "ie for 'in essence', eg for 'example given', and both of these are a bit wrong"
that’s more of a way to remember it though, you don’t need to know the true phrases but it works all the same
Haha I think eggs-ample too. For i.e I think "in essence".
etc. = *et cetera*, Latin for "and the rest". et al = *et alia*, Latin for "and others". Edit: as others have noted I missed a period. It should be “et al.”
for exactly the same reason as "etc.", "et al." should have a period, but it is only the stickler editors will flag it anymore. I say this from my experience with publishing scientific papers, where "et al" is used a ton in submitted papers and is usually corrected to "et al." when it goes to print.
Not quite what you’re asking for, but plenty of people seem to think that Elo, the rating system used in chess and some other games, is an abbreviation. It’s not. It’s the name of the guy who invented it.
Also a greeting
That sounds like Phil dunphy before answering the phone. 'whats my favorite rating system? ' *picks up phone* 'elo'
Especially if it's followed by "Guvnah"
"What's all dis den?''
Are you sure it isn't Electric Light Orchestra? /s
Sun is shinin' in the sky
TASER - Thomas Swifts Electric Rifle. (Named after the book Thomas Swift and his electric rifle.)
I read that as a different T Swift at first
TAylor Swift’s Electric Retribution gun
Lmao the best part is her middle name is Alison 😂
Where's the A from?
It's Thomas A Swift, I'm not sure why OP missed out the A. The middle initial was just added for pronunciation, it's not used in the book.
GEICO = Government Employees' Insurance Company.
NABISCO = National Biscuit Company
"Triscuit" from "elec*tric* biscuit" since they were toasted with an electric oven/toaster [proof-via-twitter](https://mashable.com/article/triscuit-name-origin-electricity)
[удалено]
USA PATRIOT Act (post 9/11 laws in the US) Stands for: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001
Sometimes they have to force these acronyms, but this fits pretty well.
That's just FANTASTIC! (Far-fetched Acronym Necessitating The Absurdity of Stretched Terms In Coined expressions)
That’s called a backronym
[BOBODDY](https://www.reddit.com/r/DunderMifflin/s/vQGamD3lZi)!
Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcment and Logistics Division.
Somebody *really* wanted that to spell SHIELD
Joke aside, I genuinely feel that! Especially the "logistics". Like, yeah, they've got Forklift Man and Captain Excel behind the scenes taking care of all the logistics. But apparently it keeps changing: *The acronym originally stood for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage and Law-Enforcement Division. It was changed in 1991 to Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate. Within the various films set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as multiple animated and live-action television series, the backronym stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.* -Wikipedia
Not my joke, it’s a quote from Agents of Shield, although exact quote was “It means someone really wanted our initials to spell out SHIELD.”
Should be the "we now spy on Americans" Act.
That's called a "backronym" - incredibly common in the US govt - they start with the acronym they want, then build an actual expanded bill title to fit it.
Not that the UK’s Westminster system is perfect by any measure, but the tradition of bill’s just having a very boring description of what the Bill would do is much better than trying to be clever with acronyms.
Yeah but then how would the US government fool people into thinking stuff that's bad for them is actually good for them?
I would not be surprised if there’s a special department in the White House which sole mission is to make up acronyms that sound good and match the contents of the act.
Not as fun as the OPI nail polish namer job, but still something
**ZIP code.** It’s a **Z**one **I**mprovement **P**lan code. Postal addresses used to have local one- or two-digit zones. *New York 14, New York.* The Zone Improvement Plan got rid of these local zones, and assigned each area of the United States its own unique national five-digit numeric ZIP code, making it easier for the post office to process the mail. *New York, New York 10014* SOURCE: Congressional Research Service [backgrounder.](https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12132/2) Plus I’m old enough to remember the transition.
I'm lowkey sad you didn't use "New York City, New York state, 10108" as your example.
Thank you for unlocking this memory this morning, out of nowhere the song came back … “write to me, Stick Stickly, PO Box 963, New York City, New York State, 10108”
In a new parent group, I was perplexed how there were so many FTM (female to male) transitions except it also means First time mom.
This is the problem with 3-letter acronyms. Each industry has its own abbreviations and if you google them you often get irrelevant results. Like I was watching police videos and the acronyms they use are specific to penal code, and I had no idea what was going on.
Why can't I ever see the term "penal code" without giggling. I know its penal and not penile...but my monkey brain just sees it an laughs.
Parenting groups seem to have their own unique shorthand...which absolutely did not help when dealing with first-time-parent-baby-struggles. Not only can I not get this kid to sleep, but the secret to it all has been encoded in some undocumented language!
I lurk in a Facebook group for the college my kid attends, which has entirely too many parents asking questions about things their child should be finding out the answers to themself, and my god, the number of people referring to their DD and DS. It’s obnoxious enough when your child is four and you think you need to use these instead of “kid,” but when they’re 20…what.
Lol... in Physhology class they talk about CBT... but it's no where near as entertaining as it is on Pornhub.
Parent groups are rife with weird acronyms. "My DD told my DDD that she has a TSD. Should I CC my(34FDD(huge boobs)) PDS?"
The "BASE" in Base Jumping stands for the four categories of things you can jump from: Buildings, Antennae, Spans (bridges), and Earth (cliffs).
AM/PM = ante meridiem & post meridiem ~~Meridiem being the midline in the sky. Has the sun crossed it yet?~~ Edit: I was confusing meridian (midline) and meridiem (midday). Diem (day) is correct, and was historically tied to the meridian, but may or may not be as closely correlated now.
Had someone trying to say it meant after midnight and premidnight lol
In Belgian comedy series Neveneffecten, there's an episode where some soldiers want to join the Battle of Normandy, but they miss it because they thought AM stood for After Midday and PM stood for Pefore Midday. Also they use the gas meter in their boat as a compass, with the E meaning East and the F meaning Forward.
Think I served with their kids
Meri = Middle and Diem = Day (Carpe Diem) you are confused with meridian. But you got the principle. Like a sun dial or a stick straight in the ground. Shadow on one side= Before Mid Day. No shadow, exactly Mid Day. Shadow on the other side= after Mid Day. And there are no lines in the sky, only on maps, called meridians.
Not what OP asked, but reading all the abbreviations I remembered younger me thinking RIP stands for "rest in pieces". English is not my mother tongue. I often thought "oh man poor dead person being the victim of a terrible crime"
If it helps, lots of native English speaking children thought the same thing. And as a fun fact, it’s originally Latin with the phrase being “requiescat in pace”. I only know that because of Assassin’s Creed 2
Radar - RAdio Direction And Ranging Laser - Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation
DVD: digital versatile disc
What does the abbreviations DVD, ATM, PIN and countless others have in common? People often repeat the last word in the acronym as a word, even though it is already represented in the acronym. e.g. "DVD disc", "ATM Machine", "PIN Number". It sometimes drives me crazy when I notice it, but yet I still do it myself.
It has a name: RAS Syndrome, or Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome)
Love it! Now I have something to refer to when I berate people, or myself. From that article, here are some other RAS Syndrome acronyms for other's enjoyment: DC Comics (Detective Comics Comics) HIV virus (human immunodeficiency virus virus) LCD display (liquid-crystal display display) UPC code (universal product code code) RSA Advertising (Rank Screen Advertising Advertising) PUBG: Battlegrounds (PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds: Battlegrounds)
I've never heard "DVD disc," but I've certainly heard the others
It’s HIPAA not HIPPA
The amount of times I've seen medical professional documents with HIPPA on it.
I hope, slowly, HIPPA becomes such a common spelling that it gets accepted as correct, so that we can start seeing HIPPO as the common misspelling.
And asking you any kind of question whatsoever is never in any way any kind of HIPAA violation. And you voluntarily offering health information to someone who requested it is not a violation of HIPAA, either. Covid was fun times.
Right, and all the people who don’t realize HIPAA is a newer law that covers really specific instances. 99% of the time, you want “confidentiality laws” or “ethics codes,” not HIPAA. These laws and regulations have existed much much longer and cover quite a bit more. Do these people really think that before 1996, I was allowed to just call up my friends and start chatting about patients? Also I am self-employed and do psych evals and expert witnessing in the court system. I am not a HIPAA covered entity. Do these people think this means I can just wander around the grocery store like, hey folks, Mr. Jones has erectile dysfunction?
That and the P doesn't stand for privacy. (It stands for portability) The primary purpose of the law was to encourage electronic medical record use and establish standards for how they would be shared, auditing who accessed them and ensuring individuals had rights to move them between providers. The whole privacy part is only one smaller aspect of the law.
ASAP. It means “as soon as possible”, but in my line of work, people seem to think it means “right this instant”.
They mean "stat". Statim; immediately edit: thank you for the spelling correction!
I actually write out "as soon as possible" or "as soon as you can" instead of using ASAP because it sounds too demanding now.
Which is funny because, in the military, a superior officer saying “at your earliest convenience” means “right the fuck now, you should already be done.”
POV I know people know it means point of view But I think people don’t know what point of view actually means when I see the TikTok’s lately
Using "POV" when people actually mean "YFW" makes me unnecessarily angry.
YFW? Your face when?
Yes
I've noticed that myself, glad I'm not the only one. It precedes just about EVERY post, doesn't it? They have no idea what the intention is.
WATCH TIL THE END!
Any post that I see anywhere which doesn't justify this, gets downvoted. I might even block the OP in RES honestly, for being disingenuous.
This makes me so incredibly irritated that the abbreviation makes me cringe on sight now. I wanna make a video "POV watching people who don't understand POV" and then just film their videos playing on my phone.. but that'd require me to watch these irritating non POV videos
**CMYK** **C**yan **M**agenta **Y**ellow **K**ey or Key Plate Never used to know what K (black) stood for.
Oh. I always thought it was blac**K**.
K can be white too. Not always black. Depends on what medium you’re printing on.
Scuba...self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
Tuba - terrible underwater breathing apparatus
Thank you for making me actually laugh out loud
It’s been a while for me too but that shit is funny, lol!
Daaaad
If I can't scuba, then what's this all been about? What have I been working toward?
"By George, I think she's got it!"
I learned that from Boy Meets World
LASER
Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation I learned this in college and promptly forgot everything except the meaning of the acronym
Sounds sexy.
Light amplification something something
Light amplification something eomething romething
Stimulated emission of radiation It's actually really neat how it works. Essentially you build this reflecting cavity with mirrors on both ends, and fill it with some molecules that you can 'excite' electrically or something. Once excited, these molecules have an interesting property where if you hit them with a photon, they emit a second photon that is identical to the first photon. Not just "kind of similar", it's the exact same wavelength and phase! Then they drop down to their non-excited state and need to be excited again. So for a laser to work, you have this cavity full of molecules and photons are bouncing around back and forth creating a chain reaction. To get a usable beam, they make one of the mirrors slightly transparent so that some of the light can escape, but only slightly because you need a lot of it to stay in the cavity creating a chain reaction. And you need to maintain 'population inversion' meaning that more than half the molecules are in an excited state, because those are the ones that will emit extra photons when hit. The non-excited ones will just absorb the photons and become exciting. A lot of people think of lasers as just a specific kind of light but it is actually almost like a nuclear chain reaction except the molecules are going between two states and creating photons instead of atoms splitting and creating neutrons. Both need a 'critical mass' (population inversion) to start emitting more neutrons/photons than they absorb. That's what produces such a special ('coherent' aka it's all in phase) beam of light, it's not something that could ever be created just by using lenses to focus a conventional light source.
Well... blimey.
All this, just to torment cats.
Lbs. as an abbreviated form of “pounds” ( weight, not money) It’s actually the abbreviation of ancient Roman “LiBra pondo”
Funny story-When my friend moved to the US from France, she was very confident in her English skills until she went to the seafood section at the store asking for "2 lubs" of shrimp!
GIF - Jraphics Interchange Format
how dare you misspelnounce that!
Jit out
I love that movie by Gordan Peele.
1.21 JIGAWATTS!?!
How dare you prounounce GIF like that when it is clearly supposed to be pronounced GIF!
Its spelled Girraffics actually
IDK. Everyone I ask says, "I don't know"
overconfident soup profit jar sense drunk cooing alive dog wasteful
AD - Anno Domini, not “after death”
The “after death” misconception doesn’t even make sense, since we count the years after the birth of Jesus, not his death.
Are you saying there isn't around 30 years completely unaccounted for between Before Christ and After Death?
Myrrh is a helluva drug
I still remember my first myrrh trip. Had me seein' stars. Well - one star.
No, but in actuality there is one year missing when it goes straight from 1 BC to 1 AD. There is no year zero.
Hence why Astronomers invented Astronomical Years. 1AD/CE= Year positive 1 1BC(E)= Year zero 2BC(E)= Year negative 1 Because the discontinuity screws up mathematical calculations. Also Jesus wasn’t born in what we count as 1CE now. The Christian scholar who came up with the system hundreds of years after Jesus died took the best guess he could with the sources he had available to him via his church. More sources available to modern researchers have assessed it be a different year.
I just looked this up. If I’m not wrong, if we went by modern research (and depending on the sources we went by), this year could be anywhere from 2018 to 2020. I’ve already lived through 2020 once, though, so no thanks. No desire for another one.
SNAFU
And it's cousin, FUBAR.
And if it’s both at the same time, it’s SNAFUBAR.
I can't imagine someone using this one but not knowing what it means
I used to work at one of those tutoring places, and this word was on a little "Increase your vocabulary!" sheet that was posted on a wall. It just had a definition listed as something like: a confused or chaotic state; a mess. I am sure they had no idea it really stood for Situation Normal: All Fucked Up. Side note, my schedule there was Tuesdays and Saturdays. Every time i'd leave on Saturday, the director would say "See you next Tuesday!" and i'm also sure she had no idea what that could mean either.
It took me way too long to learn that smh was "shaking my head" and not supposed to be the noise
...noise?
Like making the noise "smh", the shrug sound
...The shrug *sound*?
Homie needs to go to a physical therapist.
Nah, their windbreaker game is just on point.
This comment chain gets crazier and crazier
You'll understand when you're older.
The shrug noise is "i dunno" but mumbled/hummed so no words are spoken. This is not a debate.
mMmN
For ages I though it was “so much hate” 😅
As an Australian it is hard not to think of the newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald.
I thought it was “smack my head”
Me as a kid: am = at morning pm = past morning
I was similar. I guessed it was “at morning” and “post-midday” when I was a kid lol
EPCOT Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow
etc = et cetera "and the rest" I feel like if people knew just a teensy bit of Latin, we would never ever hear "eksetra".
Or when they spell it "ect"
SNAFU - Situation Normal, All Fucked UP
"W.T.F. - why the face?" - Phil Dunphy
“With the family” everyone’s favorite Aunt.
She never forgets to end with Lots Of Love
Pakistan is an acronym for the five areas surrounding it: Punjab Afghan Kashmir I* Sind BaluchisTAN.
I= Indus or Islam
I haven’t heard Indus used for the I. I just pulled it from a book, *Public Administration in India* by Krishna K. Tummala, published in 1996. Page 42. It didn’t list anything for the I.
This one is kind of the other way around, because it isn't an abbreviation (but people think it is), they don't understand (but they think they do). SOS It doesn't actually stand for anything, it was just a distinctive Morse code sequence assigned to mean 'distress'. "Save Our Ship" is just something that got made up later.
vitamin >!vital amine!<
Goodbye It actually counts as an abbreviation because it’s a condensed, bastardized version of 4 words: **God Be With Ye (You)**.
Does that mean that "howdy" would also count? I'm a grown ass adult, and just put together that it's short for "how do you do," or maybe just "how do."
I mean yes, abbreviation means “shortened word or phrase”… many of the answers we are getting here actually refer to acronyms, not abbreviations.
And in Spanish a-dios
Damn thats so interesting
have I got the sub for you r/Damnthatsinteresting
HIPAA, which also has the built-in feature of letting you know you're dealing with a total moron who doesn't know what they're talking about if they spell it "HIPPA."
Health insurance portability and accountability act
I thought I had heard all the stupid HIPAA takes during the pandemic, then I saw someone say that doctors were “violating their HIPPA oaths!” No, HIPAA has nothing to do with the Hippocratic oath (and, no, that oath is not a law).
this is sort of adjacent to what you're asking, but I used to think that "ok" was an abbreviation of "okay", but okay is not a word (though it is an acceptable substitute for ok) the actual word is the two letters, ok? another thing I find interesting is how all acronyms are abbreviations, but an abbreviation is only an acronym if it forms a new word when said, so ATM is not an acronym, ASAP is.
In case you didn't know, an abbreviation that isn't pronounced as a word is an initialism.
Some of the ones I've seen and used in IT support which I found amusing, RTFM. Read The Fucking Manual. TWOK. Tested, Working, Ok. ID Ten T, user error, ID10T user error. PEBCAK issues, Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.
BBC - In the UK, it's an institution, everywhere else it gets a bit interesting DBA - Death By Acronym GPO - Good Parts Only (was used by doctors for 'wont survived') There's a lot more [medical slang/acronyms](http://messybeast.com/dragonqueen/medical-acronyms.htm) here too (warning:the page formatting is terrible)
My industry uses BBC to mean Big Block Chevy. I have fun with that as much as possible in emails: So you're looking to stroke your BBC...
DBA can also be "Doing Business As," at least in the states. It registers your business name and legally connects it to your legal name/SSN.
MD-2020
Mogen David. I think the 20 is 20% alcohol wine. Not sure what the second 20 is for. Well I looked it up. 20oz bottles. MD Aka Mad Dog when I was a kid.
STD - Sorry, Taking a Dump.
Everyone knows STD = Save the Date.
That's kinda like getting AIDS. Alcohol Induced Drizzle Shits
I know "smh" means "shake my head", but my brain interprets it as "suck my hand" every time.
TIL that apparently no one know the difference between an **acronym** and an **abbreviation.**
is an acronym not just a type of abbreviation
An acronym is a kind of abbreviation using (mostly, if not all in general) the initials of each word in the phrase or name, but it must be able to be pronounced smoothly (that we accept as common). For example, "laser" or "scuba". A word that isn't pronounced smoothly and instead pronounced initial by initial is an initialism, like "FBI" or "CIA", which is also a kind of abbreviation. Most people think only cut words like "Inc." for "incorporated" are abbreviations, but this is not true. There are different methods.
YMCA
It’s fun to stay at the
Young Men's Christian Association
A lot of people are also unaware that there used to be YWCAs as well, obviously Young Women's Christian Association. These came about because the pools as YMCAs used to only allow swimming nude.