Archive for Acronyms
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“BBEG is an [abbreviation] for Big Bad Evil Guy[:] a climactic villain in an action-adventure setting.”
The other day, I heard about my favorite bill-name acronym in ages. The acronym in the Stop STUPIDITY Act stands for “Shutdowns Transferring Unnecessary Pain and Inflicting Damage In The Coming Years.” (One might think that would abbreviate to STUPIDCY or STUPAIDITCY, but one would be wrong.) This replaces my previous favorite bill-name acronym, the […]
Gimme a T! Gimme an A! Gimme a B-L-E! What's that spell?
I was amused by this 2006 thread in a dating forum, asking about the meaning of the phrase NSA Relationship in a dating profile. Consensus seemed to be that the term really meant “No Strings Attached,” but respondents suggested a variety of other acronym expansions, such as: “A relationship with someone in the National Security […]
The PADI (scuba instruction) people should hire a consultant from the medical-training industry to come up with mnemonic acronyms for their lists of “five steps to do such-and-such” or “nine...
LPT, I recently learned, stands for Life Pro Tip: a tip about how to do something in real life (as opposed to on a computer). My understanding is that, as...
In English, most of our two-letter abbreviations are written as either two letters by themselves, or two letters with one or two periods. But there are a few that are...
Just came across a couple of terms I hadn't encountered before in an article about leaked US diplomatic memos: SIPDIS (applied to items for DIStribution on SIPRNet, the Secret Internet...
I first encountered the acronyms “LGTM” and “SGTM”—“Looks/Sounds Good To Me”—at work. I'm sure that plenty of people elsewhere use them, but I don't see many instances of them on...