Learning the true meaning of acronyms is fun! For example, a lot of people know that “scuba” stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Not a lot of people know that “tuba” stands for Terrible Underwater Breathing Apparatus.
What??
You will never understand how confused my partners were when I burst out laughing for seemingly no reason. I’m gonna be thinking about this for a long time. 
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As opposed to “COAT”…
Coziest
Of
All
Time
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Murderous
Openwater
Alligator
Trouble
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Generally
Lame
Option
After
Triumph
(Brain really fired on all cylinders for that one)
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I think I made a MOAT romance game!
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The pet peeve I try not to think about is when acronyms cause redundancy, like “NIC card” - NIC already means “network interface card”.
RADAR is “Radio Detection And Ranging”
SNAFU is “situation normal all fouled up”
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My BFF and I have a habit of giving people we don’t like acronym nicknames. For instance, we call her ex-husband AL, for Anal Leakage. We’ve been best friends for 35 years, so you can imagine the amount of these we’ve had over the years, and no one can understand us because of all the acronyms and general shorthand.
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People who say “ATM machine” are the Greatest Offenders of All Time in that area.
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Someone should alert the AAAAAAAA
American Association Against Aggregious And Abhorrent Acronym Abuse
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As a former virologist, people using the name Covid bugs me, because there are many COronaVIrus Diseases, and everyone has had one many times. The common cold is often caused by coronaviruses. But possibly this is some ivory tower BS giving me grief.
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I blame the medical professionals for that one. When the media started talking about it, everyone was calling it “coronavirus”, which was a problem because (as you point out) there are so many other coronaviruses in the world. So they scrambled to give it a more specific name people could use instead…and settled on COVID-19. Can they really be surprised when people shorten that to “covid”, and thus get exactly the same vagueness they were worried about in the first place?
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Yeah, it lowkey irritates me but more in the way where I wish the official name had been something else, because you can’t just give people a four-syllable name and expect them not to abbreviate. It’s not like people go around saying “influenza” in casual conversation.
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Further compounded because this is the first time most non-scientists/medical people have had any reason to think about COVID-anything in the first place, meaning that no reason was seen to consider retaining the “-19”.
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All scientists need to take a page from the Drosophila (fruit fly) researchers, because those guys are AWESOME at naming things. There’s a fruit fly gene they called “sevenless” for good reason, and then when they discovered genes related to sevenless, they called them “son of sevenless” and “bride of sevenless,” etc. In my phage lab, we always gave really boring names to things, you know, just a few letters and numbers. Yawn. Virus people have no imagination.
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First I thought: I need to know more context. And then I thought: I don’t need to know more context.
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As a proofreader for academics, I spend so much time correcting ‘Covid’ to ‘COVID-19’. If people writing actual scientific articles can’t get the name right, there’s not much hope for anyone else.
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Here in the Netherlands, the most common name for the virus is ‘corona’, which… also isn’t great. But I guess it’s never going to go away!
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When I worked on-site, the mega network printer would add a cover sheet with the sender’s username since many documents would stack in the tray to keep track of them since they often sat for a while.
Our usernames were first initial and last name but the printer ran them together in all-caps, so in my brain I collected codenames for people which were often amusing and satisfying like Enchanter spell names: “SLAPPAN” “CRAUSCH” “FLAMONT”.
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I told her not to marry him.
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