Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: Difference between revisions

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* The All The Tropes wiki itself. Those new to the community might have to have [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|CMoA's]], [[Your Mileage May Vary|YMMV]], and YKTTW explained to them.

** Similarly, ATT and TVT to refer to this wiki and [[The Other Tropes Wiki]], respectively.

** As of 2018, the admins here would prefer to make this a defied trope. After all, there are only so many TLAs<ref name=TLA>Three Letter Abbreviations</ref> to go around and thus some of them have multiple meanings here; we'd rather be informative than cute.

* [[Truth in Television]]: The United States armed forces do this, to the point where two members of the same branch (say an artilleryman and a tanker, both Army) can't understand each other. Much worse if it's members of two different branches.

* The Armed Services see this extensively. "Private Bob! Gimme a SITREP on the PMCS of that APC ASAP!".

** A lot of personnel use this for [[Fun with Acronyms]]. A radar operator might call in "An unidentified B-1-R-Delta (bird) possible hostile G-U-Eleven (gull) class" Or a technician might report an "ID-ten-T (id10t) user error" or "Equipment inoperable in O-F-F Mode"

** It is said (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that the American armed forces run on TLAs,<ref~~>Three-Letter~~ ~~Acronyms<~~/~~ref~~> ETLAs,<ref>Extended Three-Letter ~~Acronyms~~</ref> and MTTLAs.<ref>More-Than-Three-Letter ~~Acronyms~~</ref>

** It is said (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that the American armed forces run on TLAs,<ref name=TLA /> ETLAs,<ref>Extended Three-Letter Abbreviations</ref> and MTTLAs.<ref>More-Than-Three-Letter Abbreviations</ref>

* Civilian aviation inherited this from the military for the same reason they us it: brevity is important over crowded radio channels and there are lot of technical terms in use. For example: "I'm gonna study the SOP, refer to the FAR/AIM and the POH, then go up and practice an ILS, VOR, NDB and GPS approach out of EVB. Oh, not GPS, cause RAIM is inop."

** Or: "I am going to study the standard operating procedure, refer to the federal air regulations aeronautical information manual and the pilots operating handbook, then go up and practice an instrument landing system, very high frequency omnidirectional range, non directional beacon and global positioning system approach out of New Smyrna Beach municipal airport. Oh, not global positioning system, because the receiver autonomous integrity monitoring is inoperable." Suddenly the acronyms seem godsend instead of an annoyance.

* Laptop computers used to use a type of expansion slot known as PCMCIA, an acronym for the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association, the group of companies that got together to develop the hardware standard. Owing to what a mouthful the acronym was (not to mention how non-descriptive it proved to be once you bothered to unroll it), the acronym is jokingly said to mean "[[Fun with Acronyms|'''P'''eople '''C'''an't '''M'''emorize '''C'''omputer '''I'''ndustry '''A'''cronyms]]".

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:The name was eventually changed to the much shorter "PC Card", before the format was replaced entirely by Express Card.

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The name was eventually changed to the much shorter "PC Card", before the format was replaced entirely by Express Card.

* Old [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TLA.html hacker anecdote]: When asked what "the biggest problem in computing in the '90s" would be, one hacker is said to have quipped, "there are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms". When you have [[Fun with Acronyms|joke acronyms]] [[Hypocritical Humor|bemoaning the plethora of acronyms]] in your profession, it's pretty bad.

* There's an old song by [[Allan Sherman]] ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roAWodrsZXI Harvey and Sheila]'' that celebrates the acronyms of life in the USA.

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