Acronyms Gotta Love'em

I have worked many places where acronyms abound and this is one of the topics I’ve had fun with over my career. I’ve always liked to create alternate meanings for some of the most used acronyms and post them in a little notice on my office wall. Just for reference my experience with Fedora Linux is with Workstation. I’ve never used KDE.

Wednesday I attended the meeting for prioritizing bugs. One of the bugs was on PIM software. My Prior experience with PIM was as “Product Information Management”; so I ask the silly question “What is a PIM db used for in KDE”. Silence followed, but I didn’t follow up. Today I did a search and found the PIM is “Personnel Information Management” in KDE. Acronyms… Gotta love’em. I wonder what else PIM is used for.

Anyone have any favorite acronyms or alternate uses of acronyms?

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I’m tying to avoid acronyms for the same reason. Bugs is a topic. I’m wondering how many bugs are estimated to be present in the current kernels we are using? Bugs are considered to be the main resource of security issues.

The National Weather Service (NWS) in the United States is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The common joke among NOAA employees and weather enthusiasts is that NOAA actually stands for National Organization for the Advancement of Acronyms.

Until relatively recently, the Area Forecast Discussion (AFD) that each forecast office produces when they update the forecast package was full of acronyms and other abbreviated words. The primary reason for this was because the AFD, like most other NWS text products, was created in a time when TeleType machines were the main way information was passed around. Since the AFD was intended for other weather forecast offices (WFOs) and media meteorologists, and not the public, shortening the text was a great way to speed transmission. So you’d get something like this

SHWRS AND TSRA CLD DVLP THIS AFTN INVOF OFBS. FROPA AFTER 20Z SHLD DROP POPS TO 0.

Which translates to:

Showers and thunderstorms could develop this afternoon in the vicinity of outflow boundaries. Frontal passage after 2000 UTC should drop the probability of precipitation to zero.

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That’s a real acronym treasure chest.

I just remembered one from BAL “Basic Assembly Language” ZAP “Zero and Add Packed”. Programming languages are full of such things.

Oh Noo Not Teletype! A single board development system I had used a Teletype as the IO device. I used to leave my little lab room and close the door when I printed out my code.

Interesting. Nice to meet you. I wish you a nice party tomorrow!
I’ll be away for a couple of days.