Acronym awareness

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Working in the computer industry you develop a habit of talking in acronyms. I’ve often found it amusing how the acronym over time becomes the proper name for the thing it identifies–that there come to be a set of people who know the acronym and the thing it identifies, but who don’t know what the acronym is a short form of.

This isn’t just the ones that have no consistent answer, like DVD, or the geek joke ones like GNU, it’s even things like IBM or SQL. I hear this all the time with HTML and XML. I find it fascinating.

I bet all the guys I play poker with would know whether or not to buy and IDE or SATAThis one is more complicated. SATA stands for “Serial ATA”, indicating a change from ATA, the standard at the time. ATA stands for “AT Attachment”, meaning essentially something that can be plugged into a 16-bit ISA bus. That was called the “AT bus” because of the IBM IBM Personal Computer/AT, in which the AT stood for “Advanced Technology”‘. So SATA=Serial ATA=Serial AT Attachment=Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. drive, or whether they needed a card for an ISA or PCI bus, but I bet not one of them would know what all four of those acronyms are for. Hell, everyone with a laptop probably has a PCMCIA card or two, but since no one could remember what that was for–prompting the “People Can’t Remember Computer Industry Acronyms” joke–the standards body renamed those cards to “PC cards” in the second version of the standard.

And, of course, you see this all the time in popular culture. How long until no one remembers that KFC is an acronym?

It’s one of my weird pedantic quirks that I’ve always prided myself on understanding the full forms of acronyms, in the same way I pride myself on understanding the etymology and usage history of the words and phrases in my vocabulary. There apparently was a point in time when I started to care, and before that point I just accepted acronyms at face value.

I realize this because in an article on dead media that I read this morning, I found that VHS stands for “Vertical Helical Scan”, and in reading that I became aware that not only had I not known that, but that I had never once considered VHS as an acronym, or that it might have meant something. It was just a product label.

I wonder how many other blind spots like that I have.