Acronyms are cute until they become clear as mud

As their usage widens, meanings get obscured

I was looking at the TSN website a few weeks ago and I noticed a baffling headline: “Jays trade P Venditte to Mariners for PTBNL.” The athlete in question was a little-used reliever named Pat Venditte. There are no other Vendittes in professional baseball, and the initial P did not stand for “Pat” — it was short for “pitcher.” Anyone keen enough on baseball to read the story would probably know this. But PTBNL? You have to be a baseball fanatic, or a devotee of initialisms, to know that in exchange for Pat Venditte, the Toronto Blue Jays would receive a Player To Be Named Later.

We live in a world of abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms, and there’s no going back. The problem, to my mind, is that many of the abbreviations are getting longer and more obscure. In English-speaking Canada, nearly everyone knows what CBC and QC and NHL stand for. But once the initials stretch to four and five letters, the meaning becomes harder to figure out. Do many Canadians know the difference between CBSA and CBSC, or between CBIE and CBIF? (I’ll give the answers at the end of this column.)

It’s not just in the online world that abbreviations can be puzzling. Beside a park in Montreal’s West Island, there’s a modest building with a sign outside that reads: A.S.A.P.C. / P.C.A.S.A. If you don’t know already what those initials represent, how could you realize that what lies inside are the headquarters of l’Association de Soccer Amateur de Pointe Claire, also known as the Pointe Claire Amateur Soccer Association?

Initials are convenient, of course — that’s why they’re used so widely. To say UNHCR requires five syllables, whereas “United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees” demands 14. CTV is widely understood to be short for Canadian Television — “network” is implicit — although, in fact, CTV is the official name. (TSN, by contrast, is indeed short for The Sports Network.) But the convenience fades when initials are difficult or impossible to figure out. The military is especially prone to using incomprehensible jargon. A few years ago, it could have been important to know that ROCK was part of TFK with a mission from ISAF conducted by 1RCR BG. (Again, see below.)

I’m not arguing against this trend for purely esthetic reasons. Three hundred years ago, in a famous Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, the novelist Jonathan Swift complained that “most of the books we see nowadays are full of those manglings and abbreviations. Instances of this abuse are innumerable.” The words he had in mind were drudg’d, disturb’d, fledg’d, “and a thousand others … where, by leaving out a vowel to save a syllable,” the result was a jarring sound that Swift found unpleasant to utter. But today, no one would think of pronouncing “drudged” or “fledged” with the –ed sound as a separate syllable.

That was an esthetic objection on Swift’s part — it had nothing to do with the meaning of these “manglings and abbreviations.” But I’m making a small plea for transparency of meaning. Language needs to be understood. Initialisms tend to look imposing — and part of what they impose is a barrier to shared understanding. Beware of any trend that makes everyday language sound managerial!

CBSA, by the way, is short for Canada Border Services Agency, while CBSC is the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. CBIE is the Canadian Bureau for International Education, and CBIF stands for Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility. The Representative of Canada in Kandahar (ROCK) worked in Task Force Kandahar (TFK) under the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF); the units serving in Afghanistan included the First Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group (1RCR BG). Trust me, you will never be tested on this.