This week I went to Germany where I discovered that they have a word for excessive fondness for abbreviations.
The word is abkürzungsfimmel and makes sense in a language with words of such a terrible length that appear to have been typed on a keyboard with no space bar.
But the craze for acronyms, initialisms and other abbreviations is just as widespread outside Germany, despite years of complaints about how deeply these terms confuse, exclude and generally exasperate.
In fact, the trend is up and resistance is so obviously useless that I’ve started to think it’s better to look for the upsides of the genre.
It is useful to remember that abbreviations date back at least to the time of Cicero, when the ancient Romans shortened Senatus Populus Que Romanus — the senate and people of Rome — to simple SPQR.
These shortcuts have exploded in more modern times as advances in science and technology have brought longer and more complex terms that many industries have been quick to shorten, not least the business world.
I remembered this the other day when it was sent to me new book which contained not one, not two but three pages listing the acronyms readers might encounter within it.
There was a reason: It was a book on climate finance, which meant it covered worlds chronically heavy in both climate change and finance abbreviations.
The only P words on the list included PRI (Principles for Responsible Investment); PPA (Power Purchase Agreement) and PPP, which stands for purchasing power parity and, confusingly, public-private partnerships.
There was a time when I would have taken this as another example of the idiocy of abbreviation. One of the reasons I admired Elon Musk was his repeated orders to do so SpaceX AND Tesla staff to avoid “acronyms or nonsense words” on the grounds that “anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication”.
I have an email folder titled Crazy Acronyms where I store the inhibited business communications that regularly flood into my inbox.
The #1 contender so far this year is, “CSI Names FIS Veteran Linda Fischer COO, Names New CRO, CPO, and SVP.” But the competition is tough, especially since the rise of cryptocurrencies.
Last year, I received an email quoting a CEO of a trading platform stating, without explanation: “The UST and LUNA situation, along with the recent big drops in BTC, are a clear example of how something can go crooked in the volatile world of cryptocurrencies”.
In the face of this unforgiving tide, I find it helpful to remember how much power a well-placed abbreviation can have.
A writer on the FT’s Lex column once memorably used the acronym PIGS to describe the economic woes of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, in an article titled Pigs in manure.
As the paper’s then editor, Lionel Barber, later wrote in his memoir, The powerful and the damned, this caused outrage. Readers blamed the paper for falling to the level of The Sun and Daily Mirror, while the Spanish embassy in London complained that “pig” was one of the most pejorative terms in the Spanish language.
Sadly for the embassy, the pigs have endured, probably for the same reason that acronymous behavior has engulfed Washington DC of all places: It produces memorable, catchy words that cling to an era of distraction.
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When I worked in Washington more than 20 years ago, members of Congress tended to introduce bills with the boring, understated titles you see in legislatures around the world.
Since then, Capitol Hill has become a hotbed of the reverse engineering acronym known as a “backronym.”
Thus the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or Cares Act, was followed by the creation of useful incentives for the production of semiconductors, or chips, and by the Crook Act (counter the Russian kleptocracy and other overseas kleptocracies).
Captivating analyses by a writer in Atlantic magazine last year showed that about 10 percent of bills and resolutions introduced in the previous two years had backronym names, up from about one in 20 a decade earlier and less than 1 per cent in the late 90s.
The thing about these names is that they manage to achieve what so many abbreviations don’t: instant understanding. The world wouldn’t be a better place without them. If only we could say the same about each of them.
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