TMA!

​​​​’Too Many Acronyms!’

Even after all these years in the industry, reading ICANN related documents/email still hurts my brain. They are littered with acronyms like Twitter on steroids.

“When the GAC asked the ICANN GSNO about the NOM, the IGO in the PDP who filed a UDRP, found some members of the BC violated the RRA changes proposed by the RySG and supported by the RrSG.”

See what I mean?

It is so bad that ICANN itself has a large alphabetized section on their site dedicated to acronyms. Not for the uninitiated: https://www.icann.org/icann-acronyms-and-terms/icann-acronyms-and-terms/en/nav/A

Given that domains are technical and part if the internet infrastructure, the use of acronyms is compounded with techie code (API, IoT, LDAP, DoS, SEO, SQL…).

I get that most industries have their own shortened language, which can make communicating within the industry a little easier at certain times – by the way, pharmaceuticals is also another group guilty over using acronyms. At least for us mixing up an acronym doesn’t carry the weight of accidentally causing death.

When you get to a point where industry veterans can’t even keep up then there is a big problem. It is as if people ‘get off’ throwing acronyms around in a feeble attempt to either sound smarter than the poor recipients of this verbal diarrhea or flash a badge of a secret society. Both are idiotic.

Instead, let’s try to sound human again. Here are some common sense rules of thumb for using acronyms.

– Use abbreviations or acronyms sparingly. This means more words than acronyms!

– Only use abbreviations if they are widely known across the broad readership. In other words, know your audience!

– Use an abbreviation only if the term has three or more words. Don’t be lazy!

– To use an abbreviation, write the full name in the first instance and follow it immediately by the abbreviated version in brackets. Duh!

– Only the most common abbreviations that do not need to be defined may be used in titles and headings without the full name written first. How about only `ICANN’ in titles or headings?!

I am heading to NamesCon next week, hopefully, I won’t need cotton balls to stop my ears from bleeding listening to the alphabet soup game for 3 days.