Why I love initialisms….

As someone who writes for a living you would naturally assume that I like to be as verbose as possible and that my mentality would be, ‘why use 1 word when 5 will do?’ This maybe the case when writing an article or trying to demonstrate my intellect, but in life I love initialisms.

Text messaging and Twitter are responsible for the rise in initialisms thanks to their limited space but need for maximum impact. My personal favourites are things such as:

 

 

IMHO – In My Humble Opinion
FTW – For The Win
NP – No Problem
ROTFL – Roll On The Floor Laughing

 

They save you unlimited space, however they do rely on your recipient knowing what they mean. There would be no point in me sending HHAY on it’s own, out of context they are just letters. HHAY could be Hooray Haley Ate Yoghurt or Help Henry’s A Yeti. It’s actually Hey, How Are You but with out context or shared knowledge you could interpret it to mean all sorts of things.

Initialisms are also used by companies and for products. Over time they have filtered into our language and what was once an initialism is now a word. Take NASA for example, we know it to be the people who build rockets and send astronauts into space, but did you know it actually stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The same occurred with AIDS. This word came into being because it is an initialism of Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome which is the disease.

I love it when companies who make complicated products use initialisms to simplify an overly complicated title. For example an IGBT Driver is much easier to say than an insulated-gate bipolar transistor. Whilst I don’t know what either does, I do know that IGBT driver is much easier to say.

Technology companies use initialisms a lot. Everyone knows what an LED bulbs as they are being used more and more in our homes and our cars but did you know it stands for Light Emitting Diode?

Whilst I genuinely hope that initialisms never replace words in their fullest form, I do love how many more words we can create thanks to initialisms and how much space they can save us online and on our phones.

 

To end, in the words of Tigger….TTFN!