I wish we had somehow adopted the practice of using lots of acronyms; I think they probably work much better at 1) preserving technical meanings and 2) not overloading words that people think they already understand. (You weren’t using “CIA” for anything before you heard about the Central Intelligence Agency; you probably were using “pivotal” and “act” for something before you heard about pivotal acts.) Like, I think it’s relatively unlikely that SEAI will drift in common usage, in part because it seems hard to mistakenly believe that you understand the common meaning of SEAI unless you know what the acronym stands for.
I disagree on acronyms being a good solution here – they initially are a lot of free real-estate, but quickly get cluttered up, and are hard to distinguish. I already see this with organizations with very similar acronyms that I have trouble telling apart.
I wish we had somehow adopted the practice of using lots of acronyms; I think they probably work much better at 1) preserving technical meanings and 2) not overloading words that people think they already understand. (You weren’t using “CIA” for anything before you heard about the Central Intelligence Agency; you probably were using “pivotal” and “act” for something before you heard about pivotal acts.) Like, I think it’s relatively unlikely that SEAI will drift in common usage, in part because it seems hard to mistakenly believe that you understand the common meaning of SEAI unless you know what the acronym stands for.
Man I wish I had a strong disagree react.
I disagree on acronyms being a good solution here – they initially are a lot of free real-estate, but quickly get cluttered up, and are hard to distinguish. I already see this with organizations with very similar acronyms that I have trouble telling apart.