There is something that has been bugging me more and more as time goes by, and that is acronyms. This becomes painfully apparent on certain news sites have articles on things I know absolutely nothing about. Not because I can't read the title summary, but because of the use of acronyms I don't happen to know.
It's a crappy topic I know, but I feel deep down in my heart that I must at least encourage people to use words. It's a funny thing with the English language, but we have vowels and consonants and rules like 'i before e except after c' and other garbage that doesn't particularly make sense. Then we throw ALL that out the window and just start sticking arbitrary letters together. Now I'm not going to say all acronyms are bad, but I think the French have the right idea. If you have something new that you don't have a name for, stick a committee together to come up with a new word. You might end up with some stupid names like "freedom fries" instead of "french fries" but at least they're words. Likewise some acronyms do actually make words that are unique AND pronounceable like laser and radar (yes those are acronyms).
But then we start with things like CPU, ICBM, RTFM how do you say these things like words? Typically you don't and instead just pronounce the letters. Well that is freaking fantastic. We spend tens of thousands of years coming up with language, so we can just throw that in the toilet and put together whatever sounds happen to be letters. Why even use letters anyway? How about for computer parts we just use "ook" like our caveman ancestors did. If I say "ook" I mean CPU, if I say "ook ook" I mean RAM. If I say "OOOk ook ook" I mean CDROM. As far as computers go, file types are also annoying. If you didn't know any better you'd say a file type is jay-pee-gee instead of the accepted 'j peg' as is accepted. Of course because there are no RULES for stringing together a bunch of random letters like putting a dictionary in a blender.
As I said before this becomes a sticking point because of some news sites I read, however there's just a LOT of things that are just hard, if not impossible; to understand without some sort of explanation - for which there is typically none. And each industry or facet of society has its own set of acronyms. The worst is probably the health care industry which I'm surprised anyone can understand. I wonder if 10,000 years from now some aliens won't find the remains of human civilization which has long been extinct after being eaten by a galactic space goat, and find they cannot decipher anything because half of our words have been abbreviated to letters with no explanation into which words those might actually be.
And I suppose some people bitch about how long it would take to type such words. Is that the reason we have them? I don't even know. Well the Germans have been doing this for years. Take most any English sentence and you could come up with a German sentence that is just as long but only has three words in it. Like 'ubershlokenhoffen' or something. Just take the words and slap them together. That's all it takes. Tailgunnner, railway, airport: real freaking words that convey meaning!
And while we're on the topic of stuff that doesn't make sense, why do we have a symbol for "at"? Now in modern terms this actually turned out to be super handy for email and stuff, but it really doesn't make sense. I mean 'at' isn't a long enough word for it's own symbol. In fact I'd say it takes me longer to draw out "@" then actually write "at". Why not use it for words like expedite, or acronym? Then again we have the symbol known as asterisk but when you say that, no one knows what it is. I guess that's why most people (in the U.S. anyway) refer to it as "star". And yet more fun happens when people try to actually figure out what to call the tilde key.
But anyway, I'm as apt to use WTF as anyone else, however it seems like in modern times we've just gone too far with making crap way more complicated than it needs to be. Instead of sticking words together like "airship" we create arbitrary letter combinations that require us to relearn language yet again, and make conversations totally opaque to people who aren't already familiar with them. Language evolves I suppose, but I'm thinking we're going backwards and de-evolving our language.
ook ook!