The ABCD of Acronyms

Sorry, I’ve been MIA for a few weeks. One of the enduring thing about working on projects for large MNC’s is that most of your day is occupied with RoB stuff. One thing that frightens me the most during these meetings and knowledge sharing sessions is CUA - Casual Use of Acronyms. Every company has its own alphabet soup, brewed carefully over decades. The same three letters can mean wildly different things depending on which corporate office you are working. One of the first thing I ask, when I start working for such companies is, do you have a glossary for the acronyms that you regularly use? Rarely is there one and you need to learn by asking. Sometimes I feel like a child picking up a new language.

It isn’t that acronyms were not part of our daily lexicon. But, earlier, it was simpler and kinder. In school, PTO meant Please Turn Over. Teachers insisted on put a dot after each alphabet to remind the reader that something was being shortened….not replaced. So, Please Turn Over was written P.T.O. Today, acronyms arrive fully formed, unapologetic, and permanent.

In my teens, I can across acronyms that masqueraded as a common word. The classic example was the TV series MASH…I always thought it was a cool name for a military based TV series, until my brother enlightened me that is was a short form for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Yes, Acronyms were slowly coming out of the footnotes in to the popular culture.

It was in the 90’s, with access to the Internet that I got drowned with flood of acronyms. An “ASL?” on ICQ or Yahoo! Chatroom felt like a secret code—age, sex, location—compressed into three letters that opened doors to entire conversations. That was perhaps during this period that acronyms crossed over from efficiency into identity. They stopped being mere abbreviations and started becoming social signals.

Now they are everywhere. At work, in WhatsApp groups, on social media. ICYDNK. TL;DR. FYI. TBA. Acronyms no longer explain; they assume. If you don’t know them, the problem is not the word—it’s you.

Originally, acronyms served a practical purpose. They shortened frequently used phrases in an age when writing was slow and space was precious. Some acronyms also helped in memory aid as mnemonics. But somewhere along the way, the logic reversed. We no longer create acronyms to save time or memorise; we create phrases so they can be a catchy acronym (or vice-versa). Language is bent, stretched, and sometimes tortured, just so it can collapse neatly into four capital letters that look good on a slide.

This is not accidental. Acronyms do something subtle but powerful: they create insiders.

To understand an acronym is to belong. To ask what it means is to confess ignorance. Acronyms flatten complexity into something manageable, but they also fence it off. In meetings, they allow people to speak quickly while thinking slowly. In organisations, they create the illusion of shared understanding, even when none exists.

There is also a deeper cultural comfort at play. Acronyms feel authoritative. A sentence sprinkled with them sounds decisive, global, professional. They carry the confidence of bureaucracy and the efficiency of machines. Saying “Let’s align on OKRs post QBR” sounds far more in control than admitting, “We are not entirely sure what we are measuring, or why.”

Acronyms also protect us from emotion. They sanitise language. A “layoff” becomes a “RIF.” A failure becomes a “learning.” A delay becomes a “realignment.” When words shrink, so does responsibility. Acronyms allow us to discuss serious things without fully feeling them.

Social media, of course, has taken this to its logical extreme. Acronyms now signal speed, relevance, and cultural literacy. To type in full is to appear earnest, even old-fashioned. Please just put out a HBD or HNY. Brevity is not just efficiency; it is status. If you know, you know. If you don’t—ICYDNK. 

The past few years in India, in politics, acronyms have been taken to a new level. A level of subtle indoctrination/priming. The latest being renaming the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MG-NREGA) to VB-G RAM G (Officially, it is supposed to be written with the spaces included)

What’s interesting is that even as technology gives us infinite space and instant voice notes, our words keep getting shorter. We compress language not because we must, but because we prefer to. Perhaps acronyms suit an age that values motion over meaning, participation over comprehension.

In reducing language, we reduce friction. But we also reduce reflection.

There was a time when dots between letters reminded us that something was missing and that a longer thought existed behind the shorthand. Today’s acronyms have no such modesty. They stand alone, fully confident, asking no questions.

Before I end, in case you were wondering what the ABCD in the title stood for? It is - Acronyms Becoming Confusing Daily.