A young man came to talk to our Rotary Club about water use. He was careful to explain all the technical abbreviations he used, like WWTP (waste water treatment plant) SLA (service level agreement) and PPM (parts per million). But he didn’t call them abbreviations. Or even acronyms, which they aren’t. He called them anagrams. More than once. Which we found rather amusing, but of course we were far too polite to point out his error out loud. So here’s some help for those of you who can’t tell your acronym from your elbow.

acronym • noun a word formed from the initial letters of other words (e.g. laser, Aids).

- ORIGIN from Greek akron ‘end, tip’ + onoma ‘name’.

anagram • noun a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another.

- ORIGIN from Greek ana- ‘back, anew’ + gramma ‘letter’.

abbreviation • noun 1 a shortened form of a word or phrase. 2 the process or result of abbreviating. (www.askoxford.com)

If you have to spell out the letters, as in Double-You-Double-You-Tee-Pee, that’s an abbreviation. The monosyllable KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is an acronym unless you say Kay-Aye-Ess-Ess. Some acronyms have vowels thrown in to make them a word that’s easy to say, for example, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). Others are rather contrived, for example Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH). My professional organisation the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) has, confusingly, both abbreviation and acronym. People outside our organisation call it Ess-Eff-Eee-Pee, but most of us within have sharpened our tongues to get them round the monosyllable ‘svep’.

Tips

Whether you are writing or speaking, it’s a good idea to spell everything out the first time you mention it, unless your abbreviation/acronym is really well known to your audience. BBC or the NHS don’t need spelling out in the UK, but they may be unfamiliar abroad. For foreign abbreviations you are probably better saying ‘Ireland’s national broadcasting service’ or ‘the international governing body of amateur swimming’ when you explain RTE (an abbreviation) or FINA (an acronym).

And if you must use an abbreviation, at least make sure it’s correct. A rookie local councillor was invited to approve the council’s spending of £35,000 on HNNWs to solve the town’s parking problems. ‘I can’t!’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it means.’ And nobody in the council chamber could tell him.

The following week HNNWs came up on the agenda again. And again our friend said: ‘So what are they?’ No-one had bothered to find out, so they sent the clerk out to look it up. Rather sheepishly the clerk returned to announce that the item was not HNNW but HHNW, a handheld notice writer – the thing that traffic wardens use to write your parking ticket.

So if you don’t understand an abbreviation or acronym, for goodness’ sake, speak up!

Quality underpins everything you do. Doesn’t it? When you see a swan swimming, you see a rather handsome white bird gliding on the surface. You don’t need to see the effort it’s making under the water to move itself along.

Quality is an axiom in good business practice.

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Plethora and Myriad: These two sound like a couple of heroines from a Greek tragedy. I’m sure they have their place in the richness of poetry and literature. But in business they get in the way of clear writing and slow down your readers’ journey through your website. People who don’t have the Latin, or the Greek, or whose first language is not English, will stumble on these words and wonder what the hell you are talking about.

Trust me: if you have lots of whatever it is you offer – ideas, shower heads, shoes, activities – all you need to say is ‘many’, and show a sample of your best ones.

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‘Can we get you on Mastermind, Sybil? Next contestant, Sybil Fawlty from Torquay, specialist subject: The bleedin’ obvious.’*

It goes like this. You get a nice big chunk of money to do something useful from which many people will benefit.
But hey, first, let’s generate huge amounts of paperwork on surveys and reports and strategy documents and road maps so that we can tell all those people…

…the bleedin’ obvious.

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When I was little, my mum took me to Lyon’s Corner House and I remember asking her why they had a brassiere and girdle on the first floor – I thought maybe they had branched out into lingerie. Mind you, you’re looking at someone who was well into her adult life before she found out that a Bourbon and Coke was not a Coca-Cola with a side order of chocolate biscuit.

I was reminded of my question yesterday, as I worked my way through a guide to office life in Australia:

‘It is perfectly OK to bring your own packed lunch into the office. Having said that most offices are close to a myriad of shopping malls, which have huge brassieres inside so there is a choice.’

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