What is your least favourite acronym?
What is your least favourite acronym?
Mine is OOO for Out Of Office. I always misread it in my head like a ghost and it takes me a few seconds to process. It also doesn't translate to speech—you have to say the whole thing.
Interested to see if others have similar acronyms they beef with.
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Mine are "lol" and "lmao". I get what they originally meant, and I get why most people use them nowadays. It's just that they often signal "I have nothing to contribute, but still expect people to read my crap".
As a second (third?) place, "WYSIWYG". If you're going to coin such verbose acronym, might as well sub it with an actual word, like, dunno, "transparent".
EDIT - "lol" = "lots of laughs", "lmao" = "laughing my arse off", "WYSIWYG" = "what you see is what you get".
EDIT2: as another poster correctly pointed out, "lol" also originally meant "laughing out loud". Perhaps even more than "lots of laughs".
Isn't lol short for "laughing out loud"? Or have I been wrong for like 20 goddamn years?
No. You're quite correct.
You and me both! I always heard "laughing out loud" as well.
Isn’t lol short for “laughing out loud”?
Wiktionary lists both "laughing out loud" and "lots of laughs". Nowadays though it's neither; on a pragmatic level it doesn't convey "I'm laughing" / "I laughed", it conveys amusement and/or lack of seriousness, depending on the context.
- [Alice] The Sun is a star.
- [Bob] yeah sure the sun only appears at night lol (implying: "I'm amused at what Alice said, and I don't take it seriously.")
I actually kinda love WYSIWYG because it’s pronounced “wizzy-wig” in some circles and that always makes me chuckle
I don't even recall pronouncing it in loud voice. In English I simply say "what you see is what you get", and in Portuguese or Italian I rephrase it. (Although I remember at least one person calling it ['vizi 'vige] in Portuguese. And I was, like... "what?")
Are there circles in which it's NOT pronounced like that?
WYSIWYG, when pronounced, sounds like an Irish town with weird spelling. Like Northern Whisyghwhikh, Dublin county
What about ROFL?
Not common in general usage nowadays. Perhaps it avoided the shift?