Acronyms (mostly) defeated
One of the downsides of dealing with information that arises from research sources, technical references, military articles and the like, is that they can be guaranteed to delve into the world of the acronym, innocent little strings of letters that render the meaning of an article into complete gobbledygook if being read by a stranger to the field of research under consideration. To make matters worse, they can change over time, and even change appearance.
The relatively well known North Atlantic Treaty Organisation provides a convenient example. Known widely as NATO, it’s almost as widely known as Organisation du Traité de l’Atlantique Nord (”OTAN”) by non-English speakers. When it comes to the matter of its correct presentation in print, this used to be fairly straightforward, as the capital letters of the name formed the acronym, NATO. No longer is the matter clear cut, because it’s now acceptable to capitalise the acronym in cases where it can be used as a spoken word, so NATO can be printed as Nato.
Probably still reasonably easy to get right, since either is considered to be correct.
More difficult are those acronyms that form the name of commercial companies and businesses (no, I’m not going to give any examples or free adverts), as their corporate acronyms are assembled from three of four letters of the alphabet, by a team of over-paid consultants, who will be paid about £10 k per letter to make the combination of letters, and choice of upper or lower case characters, “maximally appealing” to the client’s target market.
It makes absolutely no difference, but the consultants cleverly use the threat that “Your competitors will be doing this to attract your clients, can you afford not to”?
Oh, I almost forgot…
The main SeSco site now has automatic expansion of known acronyms used in its articles, and those that appear in its Glossary will show a dashed underline, and a tooltip containing the meaning of the acronym will appear when the mouse is over it.
Why mostly?
Well, I just noticed that some acronyms actually spell out real words, so have to be excluded, otherwise every instance of the word would be highlighted, and generate a tooltip. Not actually a problem if the word is uncommon, as it can be de-activated, but not practical for common words. For example Information Technology, commonly referred to as IT. Imagine having to mar every use of the word “it” to declare it’s use as proper word or an acronym.
Life’s never simple.
