The following is a public service announcement from the ASFUOA

[captainsblog]

.....Editorman, Editorman, your friendly neighborhood Editorman....

I may have officially hung up the red pen and exacto knife over a quarter-century ago, but the peeves, they still pet me on the head.  Tweets and txts could keep me here all night, as could any number of fumblerule's I could demonstrate, but I'm going to just mention this one, because it's infecting some very talented, educated (educator, in fact), otherwise totally brilliant writers of these parts.

I'll keep it SAS (short and sweet):

IDENTIFY YOUR ACRONYMS IN FIRST REFERENCE, PLZKTHNX.

I know, you know what "it" means. Probably everyone in your field does, and likely everyone with a long history of reading your material does, too.  But if Gentle Reader doesn't, GR feels, at best, disconnected and, at worst, stupid.

I don't care if it's academic, medical, or even sport. Jesus on a baseline, I've been obsessed about baseball since 19 freakin '67 and I read perfectly good posts by friends, damned decent people, referencing SABRmetric terms from the past decade which I do. Not. GET.  (Note: SABR= Society for American Baseball Research. GET= Not An Acronym.)

Does all that typing cramp your tweet-limit? Is that what's bothering you, bunky? Feel free to link to something that explains it in first reference. Post a picture. Assume I'm the dumbest reader you've got, and at least one or two days a month you're damn likely to be right.

Thank you. TIA.


That is all.

And the one in the header is "American Society For Understanding Obscure Acronyms."

Comments

[cinematixyz.livejournal.com]

Icon Love

[bktheirregular]

Oh, yeah. Undefined acronyms are one thing almost guaranteed to reduce me to frothing fits. Even worse, that bad habit isn't restricted to English, either - and getting the first approximation for a Greek acronym from Google doesn't help, because all too often the first page's worth of hits are all fraternities.

(And holy crap, is it me, or is baseball getting snowed under with new acronyms and statistics?)

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

Facebook statuses have their own norms and set of semiotics. Here's a fairly safe bet: if you did not understand one of the set of acronyms I used, you were not the intended audience for that status, and all of your condescending assumptions concerning my intentions toward you as a reader are thoroughly incorrect.

If you didn't understand the acronym, you're not my reader. Okay, bunky?

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

You're right, of course, that the facebooking in question was an inspiration for this (since I invented the snarkonym above in response to it), but it took a few days and more instances of the same thing for it to rise to a rant. I'm conscious of it because lawyers are as bad about it as anyone.

One of my first actual courtroom experiences was handling a workers comp case for a longtime client of my mentor- and, I'm happy to say, the last such case I ever handled, back when Reagan was still president. I walked into the initial hearing, fully prepared on the law and the facts, and the opposing lawyer from Kodak approached the WC judge and said, "ANCD, Your Honor." Nobody had prepared me for THAT. (Ultimately, I learned it was the Comp Board's version of the classic "pleading in the alternative" strategy: A= there was no accident. N= we didn't know about the accident. C=we didn't cause the accident. D= you had no damages from the accident.) Both from that experience, and my journalism training, I work very hard to ensure that terminology is accessible and meaningful to whoever might come across it- even if it makes ME come across as bitchy and inappropriate.

I am sorry.