Jaime Fuhrman and Stephen Osborne
People Against the Maniacal Proliferation of Acronyms Needs Your Help.
I knew I’d gone too far — that I needed help — when I named my son an acronym. He’s called Jeff, the word made by his initials, instead of James, his actual name.
I was so immersed in the world of environmental regulatory-speak that I thought acro-naming SOP. My husband, shooting OI b-roll with the BTS beta-cam for the local PBS station, KAID, seemed to think the idea sound. Jeff’s godmother, at ESII doing a DEQ RCRA inspection at Mod3, where the PCBs are stored, didn’t object. The only objection came from the grandfather — James.
Acronyms. Not just a problem for the technical writer, they’ve invaded every aspect of modern life, and each discipline has its own lexicon: mountain bikers, appliance salespeople, builders, architects, police officers, firepeople — even musicians (anyone know what the REO in REO Speedwagon stands for?) and artists.
There’s one woman in our agency who always speaks in full words. She’s considered odd — a few fries short of a Happy Meal — or, as we say in state government, a couple letters short of an acronym.
Like so many of the problems we face as writers and editors, acromania stems from a failure to consider the audience. If you’re writing a memo to a fellow policy wonk (FPW), the following sentence is simplicity and clarity incarnate:
“In accordance with NEPA, DOE conducted an EIS for the proposed AMWTF at the INEEL, which would treat TRU for shipment to WIPP.”
In fact, to spell out the seven acronyms would make the sentence so long and cumbersome that even wonks might lose the thread. Within one’s own hermetic community, acronyms are convenient shorthand. But when we venture outside our offices, acrobattiness wins us no friends. The preceding example, for instance, says to readers one or more of the following:
- I’m in the know; you’re a complete idiot.
- I don’t care if I communicate with you, as long as I impress you.
- I’m a faceless bureaucrat and have earned the right to talk like one.
- I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, and I’m attempting to hide that behind a wall of gibberish.
At this point, you’re wondering, “So what guidelines for acronym usage do these SOBs have?” Thank you for asking.
First: Use acronyms sparingly — no more than six or eight per sentence.
Second: Use only felicitous ones. In our business, hazardous waste has ugly acronyms, while water, the more poetic medium, has lovely ones. The federal haz waste regs are in RCRA, which sounds like Bluto gnashing his teeth after being foiled by Popeye. By contrast, our state waterquality program conducts the Beneficial Use Reconnaissance Project, better known and said as BURP. (We’re not making this up.) So never work in hazardous waste.
And finally, always spell them out the first time they’re used in a document, as EPA does in the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) Workbook (WB): The Timely and Appropriate (T&A) Enforcement Response to High Priority Violations (HPVs).
Above all, don’t let these pseudo-words control your life. Don’t become such an acronaut that you start naming your children after them. We know we’re spitting into the wind on this one — that acromania is an inevitable result of the fragmentation of our lives and languages in this postmodern age. Maybe we are just gray old ornery farts (GOOFs). Nevertheless, the madness must stop with someone, somewhere.
Jaime Fuhrman is the public information officer at the Idaho INEEL Oversight program. She has been writing about environmental programs for 12 years. E-mail her at jfuhrman@deq.state.id.us.
Dr. Stephen Osborne has a Ph.D. in English. He works at Idaho’s environmental agency as the lead technical editor. He also writes for Boise’s “alternative weekly,” the Boise Weekly. He can be reached at sosborne@deq.state.id.us.
Both are faceless bureaucrats.