LAWRIE McFARLANE
What’s in an acronym? Plenty. Why some work better than others
You might think a prestigious outfit like the U.S. National Institutes of Health would have more important problems to solve than why one acronym is superior to another. But you would be wrong.
Using “multi-level regression analysis … and trigram frequencies,” they discovered that pronounceable acronyms work better than the unpronounceable variety.
For reasons I’ll get to in a moment, I don’t think this exercise in the bleedin’ obvious quite covers the ground. But first, a short quiz. Here are six acronyms, three of which are genuine and three of which are fake. See if you can spot the real ones.
1. Key Atomic Benefits Office of Mankind. (KABOOM)
2. Bright Infrared Galaxy All Sky Survey. (BIGASS)
3. Society of Petroleum Industry Leaders. (SPIL)
4. Collaboration between Australia and Nippon for a Gamma Ray Observatory in the Outback. (CANGAROO)
5. Biologically Appropriate Real Foods. (BARF)
6. Society for More Coal Energy. (SMOCE)
Fans of the movie Naked Gun 2 1/2 will know that 1, 3 and 6 are fake. But really, is pronounceability all that matters?
How about Spain’s Servicio Hosteleria Industrial de Terrassa? Or the Comité Regional Alpes Provence federation?
Or for that matter, the Sarasota County Area Transit system. We’re getting perilously close to Procedural Object Oriented Programming here.
Then we have our very own National Ambulatory Care Reporting System, celebrated universally throughout Canada’s health-care industry as nackers. I know, there’s no “k” here. Maybe it carried over from the Kelly Kirby Kindergarten piano method. But what lamebrain came up with this?
Juliet might have assured her lover, Romeo: “That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” Yet is pronounceability the beginning and end of all things?
On the other hand, it would seem to count for something. Consider the strange decision by our own Vancouver Island Health Authority to rename itself Island Health.
You could understand the Yellowknife Health Authority wanting a change: YeeHaa doesn’t quite have that satisfying ring to it.
But what was wrong with VeeHaa? It was a perfectly serviceable acronym, and better still, selfexplanatory.
Island Health, on the other hand, is unusable as an acronym, and more than that, plain confusing. It might as well be the slogan for a colonic-irrigation clinic, or a chain of vegan health spas.
Again, why did the British Columbia Medical Association retitle itself Doctors of B.C., and in the process give up a long-established acronym — BCMA? The name doesn’t even make sense.
Which doctors are we talking about? Doctor Who? Doctor Strangelove? Doctor Zhivago?
Perhaps, with a little imagination, you can picture the discussion around the Island Health boardroom table.
“Our new IHealth project in Nanaimo has crashed and burned. Some docs at the hospital have reverted to 19th-century technology — illegible handwritten notes. And our waitlists for elective surgery are longer than the orbital period for Halley’s comet.
“I’ve got it. Let’s change our name. That’ll fix the problem.”
But the whole point of the BCMA is that it’s a society of medical doctors. Is that suddenly something to be cagey about?
Wild West rustlers used to do this sort of thing, when they grabbed a neighbour’s steer and burned a new identifying mark over the original.
It was called theft then, and I believe you could get hanged for it. Now it’s called rebranding, and you get a bonus.
In any case, Juliet was wrong. Names (and acronyms) do matter. A Remote Operations Service Element would not smell as sweet as a rose.