When Acronyms Attack

But it seems these days, the very sight of acronyms is causing enough FUD that it actually may affect people's attitude toward technology--so much so that it may be chasing customers away. IOGEAR recently conducted a telephone poll and found there is some merit to that fear.

They polled 500 California consumers--between the ages of 18 to 45--on some simple questions and discovered the following. At least 76 percent are fed up with IT acronyms that they don't understand. About 340 of the respondents were frustrated; 272 do not buy products because of the abbreviated names they don't understand and 374 of them want companies to use common language when it comes to high-tech products.

It seems that IOGEAR conducted the poll because it was concerned that many of the acronyms floating around were affecting people's buying habits. You know, just imagine yourself as a customer walking down an aisle, looking for a simple mouse. You see IOGEAR's KVM product sitting on the shelf. How are you supposed to know that KVM stands for keyboard, video and mouse? And how are you supposed to know that the product allows you to master several computers, all from one keyboard and mouse?

I can certainly empathize with the average consumer. Most of my early period as a technology journalist was spent trying to get the facts from some fast-talking marketing person who would spew an acronym every five words. I once spent an hour on the phone with a marketing person trying to figure out the difference between and ISP (independent software provider) and an ASP (application service provider). The even harder part was understanding the technology behind the more legitimate acronyms such as SCSI and FC and TCP-IP.

And, by the way, has anybody ever wondered what the letters in the EMC company represent? For sure, the first two letters stand for Richard Egan and Roger Marino, the company founders. But cubicle folklore says the "C" originally stood for the third guy who helped start the business--which, believe it or not, began as a office furniture distributor--and no one really knows his name because he supposedly quit three days after the business was started. So now, the company Website says the "C" just stands for "Corporation."

But before we go off and purge the English language of these menacing acronyms, we should consider that maybe, at the very least, acronyms provide an interesting insight into how language evolves. Consider that the older a language gets, the more idioms it contains. So I like to think of acronyms as another form of idioms. Relatively speaking, English is still a young language. Three hundred years ago, only a small portion of the world spoke English. Now, in large part because of technology, it's the business language of choice worldwide.

Besides, acronyms can be funny. SNAFU is commonly used as a word these days. But it's really has its origins in the military to describe a screwy situation: It stands for "Situation Normal All F***ed Up." And does anybody remember the old military term FUBAR? It means "F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition." Some Unix developers turned that into "FOO" and "BAR," with the FOO used as the tag word for temporary files used to test the output of a program. BAR was used to name a secondary file if you didn't want to overwrite the first file. (At least, that is what one technologist told me).

Take one of my co-worker's favorites. STOP, which stands for "Stop The Outfall Pipe." Ten years ago, some opposition movement in Massachusetts used that acronym as a rallying cry against a proposal to build a huge sewage pipe that would essentially drain sewage from the Boston Harbor out to sea (and onto the beaches of Cape Cod).

Anybody have any other interesting acronym stories to tell?