101 YEARS OLD AND STILL BOTHERED BY ACRONYMS...

CAN you tell the difference between TTFN and TTYL? Are you bemused when you text someone a question and they tell you they are AFK or tell you it is NOYB? Thanks to the wretched growth of social media, the explosion of such acronyms and abbreviations has reached epidemic proportions and I find it hard to keep up.

We were, after all, happy to sign off with a Ta-Ta For Now for more than 75 years before it mutated to Talk To You Later. And now innocent questions may meet with an Away From Keyboard or None Of Your Business, their bluntness disguised by abbreviation.

Feeling that it was high time we did something about it, I rang up Sir Nimby Asap OMG, head of the TLA and asked him whether he agreed that it was all getting a bit out of hand.

He surprised me by bursting into tears which continued for some time before he said, “Oh Beachcomber, you don’t even know the worst of it. We’re fighting against it desperately but we were almost disbanded last year.” I was astonished and asked why.

“Government cuts,” he said. “As you know, we’re the Department of ThreeLetter Acronyms and Abbreviations, or DTLAA for short, but there are so many Government departments beginning with D that they decided to drop that letter and call us the TLAA. Then some jobsworth at the Nomenclature Department wrote a memo pointing out that the Department of Two-Letter Acronyms and Abbreviations was also the TLAA and it was decided to amalgamate the two into a single TLA.”

“So the ‘T’ can now stand for either Two or Three and A has to be both Acronyms and Abbreviations,” I said.

“Exactly,” he confirmed. “It was all so different in the good old days of the T (for two) LA.” “Please explain,” I asked. “Two letters used to be enough for anything,” he said. “We had the UN, GB, the UK, and even the USA was happy to abbreviate itself to the US. Then along came the United Arab Emirates and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the number of letters in their UAE and USSR abbreviations aroused a feeling of inferiority.”

“Strictly speaking,” I pointed out, “the UK is the UK of GB and NI,” which is surely enough letters for anyone.

“And that,” he said, “I suspect to be the reason for such monstrosities as Unesco and Unicef. But to go back to the T (for two) LA, the real problems began with the AA and the AA, the Automobile Association and Alcoholics Anonymous. This confusion has long been blamed for an increase in drunken driving, you know. Frankly though two letters is enough only for 576 organisations which is why we have to share GB with Goodbye, Guantanamo Bay or even a Gastric Bypass and UK may also be the Universities of Kansas or Khartoum or the Indian state of Uttarakhand.

“You know,” he added, “when I saw the OMG after my name, I thought it referred to the Order of St Michael and St George, like CMG and GCMG. It was years before I learnt it was text speak for ‘Oh, My God’.” Then he burst into tears again and no more was said.