Says the person who DOESN’T work in a government office. Around here, they’re a valuable commodity to enhance the incomprehensibility (and thus perceived value) of your work. If I said “You failed to keep your TFS/CF RE appointment so there is currently nothing on your EBT” it sounds MUCH better than “Hey, you blew off your redetermination appointment so you don’t have any food stamps.”
I work for a council, maintaining / supporting / updating a social care database. Council acronyms, social care acronyms AND computer-related acronyms to boot! Alphabet Soup-a-mondo!
Oh, and the entire management hierarchy changes every couple of years, and almost every level in the hierarchy has an acronym – which changes every time the team / business unit name changes. Not to mention other terminology – do we deal with service users, clients or customers?! Although technically they are service users, and as we provide a service to them, they’re clients, we’ve decided to go all business-speak and call them customers.
My team used to be the Information Strategy Team (IST), part of Commissioning, Planning and Partnerships (CPP), in the Children Young People and Families (CYPF) Directorate. Then we merged with other teams and became Commissioning Support Service (CSS) within Commissioning and Resources (C&R), and now the six Directorates are three Groups and we’ve had yet another name change to (wait for it)…
Integrated Information Systems and CareFirst Programme Management
Erm, IISCFPM? In the Business Management (BM) Business Unit, within the People Group (PE). But hey, we get to talk about Cold Fusion! (Albeit the software definition, unfortunately)
Hey! How’d you guys know about our motto? or was it just obvious? MIT class of ’71
Another I remember is from spring ’68, now I think the low numbers are funny/sad. Tuition was $1900, and they raised it. We had a rally and chanted “2150, too damn much!”
My first guess was “I Have To F***ing Pee”, but when I looked up IHTFP, oddly that was not among the listed meanings.
Granted, that particular definition wouldn’t really have much meaning to an AI designed only for thought, but GODOT still could’ve easily come up with it.
No, there are more, it’s just that some of us don’t care about that one all that much. I’m happy if people just don’t use antonymous words for what they mean (“I could care less” *shudder*), and mostly spell them right. I’ve had to allow my standards to slide a bit to retain any semblance of sanity.
How about the organization I’m registered as a Mad Scientist and Evil Sorcerer with: V.I.L.E. (Villanous Interdimensional League of Evildoers)
Which always amuses me, considering I’m actually True Neutral and not Chaotic Evil as everyone who knows me keeps insisting I am. (You can get away with a lot more as a neutral than as an evil character. I should know! -_^)
When I was a kid, SOE (Standard Operating Equipment) meant “naked,” as in “He dropped trou and stood there in his SOE.” Was that a south-side-of-Milwaukee regionalism, or did other people use it, too?
To quote a song, not being clever enough to write one:
“LBJ took the RIT
down to main street USA.
When he got there what did he see?
The youth of america on LSD”
Fie on those foreign acronyms. They don’t even make sense. How do you get CERN out of “European Organization for Nuclear Research”. Surely it should be EONR. And FIFA apparently has something to do with soccer, but there’s not even an “S” in it.
Most of the acronyms that “don’t make sense” to us English-speakers are based on French, occasionally Spanish or Italian. Generally, the acronym is in the language of the country hosting the facility or the organisation’s HQ. Stable, constitutionally neutral Switzerland is a favourite HQ site, and French is the only one of its three official languages that’s spoken by a large ex-empire.
Late to this party, but still …
CERN is one of the bilingually working short forms. There aren’t too many (I know of) not relying on some Latin or Greek part.
It’s a pretty and obvious variant of German Kern ‘core, nucleus’.
Now you know. And knowing is half the destruction of the universe.
5k/s? Are you sure? If GODOT never repeated itself, it would blow through the TLAs in three seconds, exhaust the possibilities of a fourth letter in (let’s say exactly) a minute and a half, of a fifth in 40 minutes, of a sixth in 17 hours, of a seventh in the next 18.31 days, and of an eighth in 1.3 years. Though I guess GODOT couldn’t operate at peak performance all the time.
You may well have the right numbers for the possible combinations of letters (I have neither the time nor the inclination to check your maths), but each combination can have a whole range of possible expansions. For instance, COD could be anything from ‘Cash On Delivery’, to ‘Coffee Of Doom’, to ‘Chocolate Orange Doughnuts’!
My thoughts exactly. There’s a huge difference between simply printing out a list of letters – which even my several year old desktop machine can do a couple of orders of magnitude faster (all 17576 TLAs in about 10 ms) – and actually coming up with a workable acronym from them. Working with words rather than letters wouldn’t slow it down much, so it obviously involves a lot of semantic filtering to get the speed down that low (that or they’re running it off another of those surplus Apple ][s we saw at the base Nick came from – gotta keep costs down somehow on these projects)
Presumably Operation Hotel Bible involves the eradication of the Gideons, or I suppose if we want to be more oblique about it it could involve support services for an expeditionary force.
As a current MIT student, this is so far my favorite strip. While “IHTFP” is a common one thrown around, if you look at ESP and any of their subdivisions (SPARK, SPLASH, HSSP, DELVE, etc), and some classes (MASLAB comes to mind), there are acronyms /everywhere/.
Though tbh, we use numbers even more excessively than acronyms. Tell someone you’re taking Psychoacoustics and they’ll look at you strangely, but tell someone you’re in 6.182 and they’ll have a reference point as to what you mean.
I mean it was Reagan’s phrase decades before it was the other guy’s. I think in context it’s meant to sound about as conservative as it sounds from our perspective, and that Gavotte is saying it ironically.
I am prety sure acronyms aren’t a resource, or even something wworth trading in.
That’s exactly what they want you to think.
Acronyms become a valuable resource as soon as you put “TM” on the end and can get Apple, Disney, and Sony to fight over it.
Says the person who DOESN’T work in a government office. Around here, they’re a valuable commodity to enhance the incomprehensibility (and thus perceived value) of your work. If I said “You failed to keep your TFS/CF RE appointment so there is currently nothing on your EBT” it sounds MUCH better than “Hey, you blew off your redetermination appointment so you don’t have any food stamps.”
I work for a council, maintaining / supporting / updating a social care database. Council acronyms, social care acronyms AND computer-related acronyms to boot! Alphabet Soup-a-mondo!
Oh, and the entire management hierarchy changes every couple of years, and almost every level in the hierarchy has an acronym – which changes every time the team / business unit name changes. Not to mention other terminology – do we deal with service users, clients or customers?! Although technically they are service users, and as we provide a service to them, they’re clients, we’ve decided to go all business-speak and call them customers.
My team used to be the Information Strategy Team (IST), part of Commissioning, Planning and Partnerships (CPP), in the Children Young People and Families (CYPF) Directorate. Then we merged with other teams and became Commissioning Support Service (CSS) within Commissioning and Resources (C&R), and now the six Directorates are three Groups and we’ve had yet another name change to (wait for it)…
Integrated Information Systems and CareFirst Programme Management
Erm, IISCFPM? In the Business Management (BM) Business Unit, within the People Group (PE). But hey, we get to talk about Cold Fusion! (Albeit the software definition, unfortunately)
Some are; some aren’t. YMMV.
IOACS.
Hey! How’d you guys know about our motto? or was it just obvious? MIT class of ’71
Another I remember is from spring ’68, now I think the low numbers are funny/sad. Tuition was $1900, and they raised it. We had a rally and chanted “2150, too damn much!”
I’d say Google helped them
1971 at mit, 2012 in montreal…
I Have Truly Found Paradise…Or not.
(I initially couldn’t place why it seemed so familiar)
You learn the most…ummm…Interesting things from old VMS system programmers.
I only encountered it before as “I Hate This F***ing Place”
My first guess was “I Have To F***ing Pee”, but when I looked up IHTFP, oddly that was not among the listed meanings.
Granted, that particular definition wouldn’t really have much meaning to an AI designed only for thought, but GODOT still could’ve easily come up with it.
YMABAW. DTTAH. RMV. KYFCYEC. TCIALSAW. TFHDAWBTTWTB.
The funniest thing is the spell-checker recognized the first three of those.
You know, Chinese acronyms are the worst.
Oh, no, Chinese acronyms are the best! Somehow, they always come out meaning something….
(TUNE: “Down The Highway”, Jim Croce)
When I was a mere nanosecond old,
I named myself … I named myself!
Printed acronyms in a typeface bold!
Filled up a shelf … a whole damn shelf!
Then I went and created “IHTFP” …
It’s still in use today
At M.I.T.!
Acronym generator!
Long phrase abbreviator!
Ab-bre-vi-ate to make our Nation great!
BOHICA. YAFIYGI. RSN.
Ye eldrich gods, someone else knows about VMS.
One night I got really drunk and tried to figure out TECO, thinking it couldn’t be much worse then ed.
I asked for it, I got it.
I heard that first one was supposed to be “BOSHICA”, but that may just be a regional thing.
And I’m surprised that nobody else posted TANSTAAFL yet!
Acronyms are pronounceable. “IHTFP” is an initialism, not an acronym.
I wouldn’t bother. There are only about three of us on the planet who remember that.
Now four.
Five, unless Jack was counting you and me among the three. (There are other linguistic peeves I pet harder than that one, but it does still bug me.)
No, there are more, it’s just that some of us don’t care about that one all that much. I’m happy if people just don’t use antonymous words for what they mean (“I could care less” *shudder*), and mostly spell them right. I’ve had to allow my standards to slide a bit to retain any semblance of sanity.
So it’s not pronounced “It-fip”? (I’m not kidding.)
Ancient Cryptic Recondite Order of Necromantic Ysian Mysticism.
American Association of Retired Galactic Heroes.
Extraterrestrial/Interdimensional Encounter Investigation Office.
And for a hentai fanwork I fortunately never got around to writing, the Crusade to Limit Interdimensional Migration of Amorous Xenomorphs.
I am definitely using those in an RPG as soon as I get an opportunity! I keep a file of such things on my iPhone, you never know when it’ll be useful.
Committee for the LIberation of Terrifying Organisms, and their Reintegration Into Society
How about the organization I’m registered as a Mad Scientist and Evil Sorcerer with: V.I.L.E. (Villanous Interdimensional League of Evildoers)
Which always amuses me, considering I’m actually True Neutral and not Chaotic Evil as everyone who knows me keeps insisting I am. (You can get away with a lot more as a neutral than as an evil character. I should know! -_^)
When I was a kid, SOE (Standard Operating Equipment) meant “naked,” as in “He dropped trou and stood there in his SOE.” Was that a south-side-of-Milwaukee regionalism, or did other people use it, too?
Now most people recognize it as Sony Online Entertainment. See, evil can triumph.
I’ve never heard of that one but I think I’m going to start using it right away. So thanks.
Mazeltov! You’re now a sixth-grader in 1968.
To quote a song, not being clever enough to write one:
“LBJ took the RIT
down to main street USA.
When he got there what did he see?
The youth of america on LSD”
One nano-second? That’s not a very long …. Oh, we did all the waiting jokes yesterday? Oh, all right …
Gotta watch out for those foreign acronyms, like M.E.R.D.E.
mrrp?
mnem
Acronyms Are For Other People.
Lines like “output like that could eliminate our dependence on foreign acronyms” are one of the reasons I love this comic.
LOL, ROFL!
USA! USA!
Fie on those foreign acronyms. They don’t even make sense. How do you get CERN out of “European Organization for Nuclear Research”. Surely it should be EONR. And FIFA apparently has something to do with soccer, but there’s not even an “S” in it.
From Wikipedia: The acronym CERN originally stood in French for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research.
Fédération Internationale de Football Association
Most of the acronyms that “don’t make sense” to us English-speakers are based on French, occasionally Spanish or Italian. Generally, the acronym is in the language of the country hosting the facility or the organisation’s HQ. Stable, constitutionally neutral Switzerland is a favourite HQ site, and French is the only one of its three official languages that’s spoken by a large ex-empire.
Late to this party, but still …
CERN is one of the bilingually working short forms. There aren’t too many (I know of) not relying on some Latin or Greek part.
It’s a pretty and obvious variant of German Kern ‘core, nucleus’.
Now you know. And knowing is half the destruction of the universe.
5k/s? Are you sure? If GODOT never repeated itself, it would blow through the TLAs in three seconds, exhaust the possibilities of a fourth letter in (let’s say exactly) a minute and a half, of a fifth in 40 minutes, of a sixth in 17 hours, of a seventh in the next 18.31 days, and of an eighth in 1.3 years. Though I guess GODOT couldn’t operate at peak performance all the time.
Also, “dependence” with another E.
Well, sure, if you’re only sticking to the declassified letters.
You may well have the right numbers for the possible combinations of letters (I have neither the time nor the inclination to check your maths), but each combination can have a whole range of possible expansions. For instance, COD could be anything from ‘Cash On Delivery’, to ‘Coffee Of Doom’, to ‘Chocolate Orange Doughnuts’!
My thoughts exactly. There’s a huge difference between simply printing out a list of letters – which even my several year old desktop machine can do a couple of orders of magnitude faster (all 17576 TLAs in about 10 ms) – and actually coming up with a workable acronym from them. Working with words rather than letters wouldn’t slow it down much, so it obviously involves a lot of semantic filtering to get the speed down that low (that or they’re running it off another of those surplus Apple ][s we saw at the base Nick came from – gotta keep costs down somehow on these projects)
OMG, COD, so YUM, nom, nom, nom
the Institute Has Truly Fine Professors
Hey, maybe I’ll get to work with GODOT when I get a job as the guy who comes up with code names for things.
I’m thinking of starting out with either Operation Hotel Bible, Operation Paint Thinner or Operation Bitter Aftertaste.
Presumably Operation Hotel Bible involves the eradication of the Gideons, or I suppose if we want to be more oblique about it it could involve support services for an expeditionary force.
As a current MIT student, this is so far my favorite strip. While “IHTFP” is a common one thrown around, if you look at ESP and any of their subdivisions (SPARK, SPLASH, HSSP, DELVE, etc), and some classes (MASLAB comes to mind), there are acronyms /everywhere/.
Though tbh, we use numbers even more excessively than acronyms. Tell someone you’re taking Psychoacoustics and they’ll look at you strangely, but tell someone you’re in 6.182 and they’ll have a reference point as to what you mean.
Wassa matta, couldn’t get John Cleese to guest star for this one?
“It helped make America great” A phrase many will learn to hate well after this comic’s creation.
I don’t think that either Jeff or Shaenon anticipated the horror currently gripping the USA, and not the fun kind.
Yeah, the punchline on this did not age well, through no fault of the creators.
I mean it was Reagan’s phrase decades before it was the other guy’s. I think in context it’s meant to sound about as conservative as it sounds from our perspective, and that Gavotte is saying it ironically.