Words, reading books – The Rise of the Acronym
When did we start speaking in sets of capital letters? Lane Greene looks into the rise of the acronym and its sibling the initialism ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2010
Perhaps the perfect modern movie is the cult classic “Office Space”. The anti-hero, Peter, begins his working day with a dressing-down from a droning boss about forgetting to put the cover-sheets on his TPS reports. We never find out what a TPS report is. Nor do we have to; the name alone tells us all we need to know about the life seeping out of Peter’s days, three capital letters at a time.
Acronyms have become so prevalent that they suffer what anything does when coined without end: devaluation. “Oh, my God” still packs quite a punch in the right circumstances. “OMG”, by contrast, is barely effective as a plaything any more.
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