I once worked on an advanced research project which was prone to the generation of acronyms. Given the client’s customer (entity shall remain nameless) was also prone to acronyms, and that I am pretty good at generating acronyms, this wasn’t a bad fit.
The trouble started when my acronym for my particular piece of the project, developed during 9 months of work and described in something like 200 pages of documentation, was arbitrarily changed by several other people, ranging from programmers to systems administrators, doing work on the project. This change was made without my immediate knowledge, and was propagated through the code base, the documentation and the mailing lists extremely rapidly. I made a very brief public announcement as soon as I learned of this, noting that the (extensive) documentation that I had written and disseminated plainly specified the acronym I had chosen.
Unfortunately, the acronym they adopted, while very similar to my acronym (differing by one letter), is actually more similar to the client’s main product, of which my piece is a sub-component. It is also more difficult to pronounce, having 6 syllables instead of 3 syllables. In fact, the full name of the application is 7 syllables, so not much savings there.
In any case, I made a strategic choice at that moment: I decided not to worry about it. Never mind the two acronyms are so phonetically close together that they form a tongue twister when used in the same sentence (my original specification does not), and that there is one difficult letter (a “W”) difference between my specification and the adopted acronym. Often, when speaking of one these within the same context as the other, the full name is used anyway to clarify precisely which product is under discussion.
Acronyms are quite often the subject of scorn and contempt; people worrying about such trivialities equally deserving of scorn and contempt. Never mind that choosing a good acronym and choosing a good name are coupled activities, and that a good name is essential for effective marketing. In any case, I spent the following 18 months quietly shaking my head to myself in amusement as both client and subcontractors tripped over the adopted acronym. However, I believe that had I attempted to enforce my original specification at the time, no good would have come of it.
It’s still twisting tongues to this day.
