Acronyms

Today, let’s all learn a nice little fact that, when spoken by you in an educational manner, can get you ridiculed in your geezer-hockey-league locker room (or probably anywhere in life). People either won’t believe you or will wonder why you think it’s important enough to share publicly. They’ll be wrong to assume the former but probably justified in thinking the latter.

Acronyms are a type of abbreviation. NHL and NASA are both abbreviations (for National Hockey League and National Aeronautics and Space Administration, respectively), but only one is an acronym. Do you know which one? If not, you will if you opt to read the rest of this sentence: NASA.

An acronym is a word formed by the first letters of other words. Because “NASA” is pronounced as a word and not as the individual letters, and the opposite applies to “NHL,” NASA is an acronym and NHL is not. But they are still both abbreviations.

None of the stupid abbreviations people use in text messages (e.g. brb, lol, idk, etc.) are acronyms. No professional sports league, to my knowledge (unless you count NASCAR as a sport), uses acronyms.

Does any of this matter? Probably not. For some unknown reason, it doesn’t irritate me to hear people misidentify abbreviations as acronyms as much as I’d expect. But I do prefer being correct to being incorrect, and maybe you do, too.

And there you have it. Now go forth and spread the truth about acronyms to everyone you know.