The Power of an Acronym

The airlines use acronyms like ILS (Instrument Landing System) professionally. But passengers have created their own list for each airline. Like: AMERICAN (Airline Meals Eaten Regularly Induces Cramps and Nausea), DELTA (Directed Everybody's Luggage To Atlanta), OR TAA (Try Another Airline). Now, guess who over uses them: Right, the .GOV (we are an internet company you know). Yep, DEA, (Drug Enforcement Agency) and my all-time favorite, IRS.

The telecom industry is famous for its TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms). SIP, WAN, LAN, FCC, SS7, PBX, NIC and down the line. It’s terminology that allows people in the industry to communicate quickly, but confuses the heck out of just about anybody else. In fact, the history of acronyms is not really known. While they have been around for thousands of years, it wasn’t until David Davis of Bell Laboratories coined the term acronym as the name for a word created from the first letters of each word in a series of words. This was in 1943.

Acronym Soup

Interestingly, acronyms are not so much an abbreviation as an actual word. Several have even made their way into our daily lives. Words like SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), RADAR (radio detection and ranging) even AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). In our world these days we even know JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group, or .jpg when you look at a computer file). Cool eh!

The restaurant industry uses them. FOHBOH (Front of House, back of House) – even our company’s name is an acronym –FohBoh. So what’s with our need to be concise?

Being brief has become a way of life. Brevity is more than being concise. Brevity means to be concise using exact use of words in writing or speech. Being concise means to give a lot of information clearly and in a few words; brief but comprehensive. Take Twitter- you redline your prose if you exceed 140 characters. In fact Jeff Pulver, best known for creating industry conferences that legitimized VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) has moved on and created #140, a conference series now rolling worldwide about what can only be termed the natural limit of the human attention span. While I value brevity and conciseness, whether human communication can be reduced to 140 characters or less “soundbites” remains a mystery.

I just find this all fascinating. How acronyms become words. How we adapt and adopt their use and how all this training is forcing us to change our behavior. Take texting, which is now a part of daily life. Just today, Rich Heaps (FohBoh’s COO) was being animated with his hands suggesting he was typing while drawing a scenario. Half way though he realized a better metaphor would be to use his thumbs, while admittedly too big for the iPhone virtual keyboard, suggesting he was texting rather than typing. Learned behavior and much more appropriate in his example. Is thumb reduction surgery in Rich’s future [I invite his response to this muse]?

SMS (Short Message Service) is almost an entire language modeled after court recording.

SMS Chat and Text Acronyms include:

BRB=Be Right Back

B4N= Bye For Now

AML=All My Love

IDK= I Don’t Know

LOL=Laughing Out Loud

>U!= Screw You!

SOL= Shit Out of Luck

There are hundreds, some more useful than others. But suffice it to say, texting acronyms are just that, acronyms. Until I see LOL in the dictionary, it’s doesn’t qualify…just yet.

So what inspired this muse? Actually, we were struggling to create a simple way to articulate what describes our restaurant social media services offering we call FohMedia. MASTERS is what @rheaps and @fohbohgal came up with: Monitor, Assess, Synergize, Techniques, Engage, Report, and Syndicate. The cool thing is it’s already a word.

HAND (Have A Nice day!)

@michaelatkinson

@fohboh