Re: Acronyms

Posted by David Eric Smith on Jan 25, 2021; 11:24pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Acronyms-tp7600393p7600400.html

A story Cormac likes to tell is that Winston Churchill once said the two things people would miss in the post-war world would be a classical education and the horse.

I don’t suppose that twitter acronyms — sort of seems like it violates the spirit of twitter, no? If the point were to escape the 140-character trivialization limit, one could just gzip some plain text and send the binary — are exactly equivalent to classical literature, but maybe one refers to more than was written by using them (?)

Eric

On Jan 25, 2021, at 6:11 PM, Barry MacKichan <[hidden email]> wrote:

When I see someting like BICBW,
1. I double click it
2. Get into a Google screen (or Duck Duck Go) (5 keystrokes using Launchbar on a Mac) It is unnecessary to copy it; Launchbar can with the selection.
3. Hit return.
4. Three out of the first five links contain the definition in the first line of the blurb. “BICBW stands for But I Could Be Wrong.”

Elapsed time: about five seconds.
Time to write this email, about 90 seconds.

—Barry

On 25 Jan 2021, at 17:31, [hidden email] wrote:

I assume when people use acronyms it is to communicate their membership in a club that I am not qualified to join, and they want me to be sure I know that.  So the medium IS the message.  Also, i’s a useful move in an interpersonal power game.  It forces the other person to come groveling back for an explication.  BICBW

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