WTF?

WTF?

Hey, what happened to acronyms all of a sudden? SAT no longer stands for anything, we are informed. Neither does AT&T, KFC, or AARP. Their meanings are obsolete, but their organizations keep using them. The whole thing is vaguely Orwellian.

Good acronyms are useful because they’re simple and memorable. But for every perfect flower (BASIC = Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) there’s a misbegotten weed (USA PATRIOT = Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism).

Deeper in the muck are bureaucracy-spawned monsters like ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHIBSPAC, Navy-speak for “Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command.”

And only the Soviet Union could have produced this:

NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT

It stands for “The laboratory for shuttering, reinforcement, concrete, and ferroconcrete operations for composite-monolithic and monolithic constructions of the Department of the Technology of Building Assembly Operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for Building Mechanization and Technical Aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR.”

Even proper abbreviations can have sadly unintended meanings. In 1945 Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, founded the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, or ALAS. They stressed the first syllable, understandably.

And I think the American Symphony Orchestra League must be very careful in training its receptionists. You can’t have them saying, “Good morning, ASOL.”