Mine is OOO for Out Of Office. I always misread it in my head like a ghost and it takes me a few seconds to process. It also doesn’t translate to speech—you have to say the whole thing.
Interested to see if others have similar acronyms they beef with.
POS I find very funny as I’m often working on Point-of-Sale equipment, and most of it is running Poorly Optimized Software, making the whole thing a Piece of Shit for the users.
Not an acronym though, but an initialism. Acronyms are said like a word, like CRISPR, initialisms aren’t, like ATM.
you’re being pointlessly pedantic. Initialisms are also considered acronyms by most defimitions and by common use.
I don’t think they’re being pointlessly pedantic. I’ve been around POS systems and some people call it by the letters, P.O.S. & others by the acronym, sounding like “pause”. Nobody assumes you’re talking about a Piece of Shit when you say “pause”. Also for OOO (“oooh”) vs O.O.O., which doesn’t roll off the tongue, but you don’t sound like Casper.
Now, being pointlessly pedantic, I find it interesting to think that if we continue to use the word acronym for initialisms, then the word acronym will actually be initialisms! English is weird!
Yeah when you say “pause” they assume you’re referring to a position.
Oh shit. TIL. Also, I guess TIL is not an acronym then lol.
Speaking of ATM, am I the only one that defaults this to “ass to mouth”, before realizing they mean asynchronous transaction machine?
Automated Teller
Ah yes this is the one
Hmmm, interesting. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anyone say “TIL” out loud. When I read it, I say it as an acronym (“till”) in my head, but I think if I ever said it out loud, I’d probably go with the initialism (“tee-eye-ell”). All that to say, maybe it’s both?
I always read ATM like that
I used to get a kick out of that at my super market because the brand of machine was “RealPOS” adding one more thing to poke fun at.