A thousand monkeys at a keyboard might eventually be able to write a Shakespeare play, but first they’d have to be cut loose from their day job — devising acronyms.
If you’ve got a handle on the NSF I/UCRC’s work to design CDADIC, which is different from the work of the NSF PSERC, though both are part of the EECS, then you, no doubt, spend a lot of time — too much time? -— talking to engineers.
The above paragraph not withstanding, Paul Schimpf, associate professor of electrical engineering at WSU Spokane, said engineering acronyms are actually an attempt at clarity.
“We want to describe what we do accurately,” he said, but that often entails a lengthy description using cumbersome terms that cry out for abbreviation.
Short and swEEEt
In a recent paper in IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering, Schimpf added to the acronym avalanche with POP MUSIC, an algorithm to solve a problem with another researcher’s RAP MUSIC. Schimpf, who uses electroencephalographs to study brain signals, said POP MUSIC stands for Pre-correlated and Orthogonally Projected MUlitiple SIgnal Classification.
“I hate rap music, so it was perfect for me,” Schimpf said, and laughed.
But engineers aren’t the only culprits.
Since the SES, not to be confused with SESRC, is now part of CAHNRS, CBE is now CB. Now remember, good buddy, we’re not talking Citizen Band radio, we’re talking College of Business.
For those in the know
Radio communication has always relied on codes and abbreviations for obvious reasons of secrecy and efficiency, but justification of acronyms and abbreviations in print usually had more to do with saving ink (and space).
“But now that isn’t an issue,” said Paul Brians, a WSU professor of English. Now, he said, acronyms seem to have more to do with signaling an insider status.
“They are very handy for people who know what they are talking about,” Brians said, “but they are a barrier to people who are new to the information.”
And sometimes, he said, that is exactly the point.
Patricia Ericsson, WSU professor of English specializing in rhetoric and technical communication, agreed. “One of the things they do very well is exclude people,” she said. “It’s exclusionary and secretive.”
A curse, but quick
While people today tend to accept acronyms as inevitable and in most cases benign, Ericsson, Brians and others pointed out that Stalin’s repressive Soviet regime created some of the earliest acronyms, some of which — like gulag — have entered the lexicon as new words. From Hitler’s NAZI party (itself an acronym) we got GESTAPO.
But FDR was no slouch when it came to acronyms either. Remember the alphabet soup of legislation that was part of the New Deal, including the WPA, CCC and FDIC?
Acronyms seem to have started in the military, Brians said, moved into government and business “and now we are cursed with them.”
William Condon, director of WSU Writing Programs, says the proliferation of acronyms is a logical consequence of our attempts to shorten words and to make everything faster, including communication.
“I’m betting that acronyms will actually pick up,” he said, particularly with the increase in text messaging.
“You don’t want to get tendonitis in your thumb,” he said.
