Acronyms gone wild
As people who know me will gleefully admit, I can be a pedant about certain things. Therefore I took great pleasure in this entry in the Q&A section of the Chicago Manual of Style website:
Q. Is it proper to define an acronym within an acronym or an abbreviation within an abbreviation? I am working on a document that contains an abbreviation that is really two other abbreviations smushed together with additional words tacked onto either side. And to top it all off, the overall abbreviation doesn’t even contain the first letter of every word in the other two abbreviations. They’ve dropped letters to make it shorter. Finally, if it is acceptable to do this sort of thing, how would I define the abbreviation or acronym on first use within the document if the two incorporated abbreviations were not previously defined in the document? Whew!
The answer was apropos:
A. Who wrote this document—Dr. Seuss? Yes, you may explain this funny animal parenthetically regardless of the lack of previous explanation. And maybe you should hire a cartoonist to illustrate.
Often I work in fields where not only are there entirely too many acronyms, but often the same TLA has multiple meanings depending on the context. This makes for all sorts of fun. All I can say is I’m happy for the acronym package for LaTeX
This entry was posted at 10:37 am on 2 May 2008 and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
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To which “TLA” were you referencing? :)
http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?acronym=tla