[FRIAM] Acronyms

[David Eric Smith]

A story Cormac likes to tell is that Winston Churchill once said the two things people would miss in the post-war world would be a classical education and the horse.

I don’t suppose that twitter acronyms — sort of seems like it violates the spirit of twitter, no? If the point were to escape the 140-character trivialization limit, one could just gzip some plain text and send the binary — are exactly equivalent to classical literature, but maybe one refers to more than was written by using them (?)

Eric



> On Jan 25, 2021, at 6:11 PM, Barry MacKichan <barry.mackichan at mackichan.com> wrote:
> 
> When I see someting like BICBW,
> 1. I double click it
> 2. Get into a Google screen (or Duck Duck Go) (5 keystrokes using Launchbar on a Mac) It is unnecessary to copy it; Launchbar can with the selection.
> 3. Hit return.
> 4. Three out of the first five links contain the definition in the first line of the blurb. “BICBW stands for But I Could Be Wrong.”
> 
> Elapsed time: about five seconds.
> Time to write this email, about 90 seconds.
> 
> —Barry
> 
> On 25 Jan 2021, at 17:31, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> I assume when people use acronyms it is to communicate their membership in a club that I am not qualified to join, and they want me to be sure I know that.  So the medium IS the message.  Also, i’s a useful move in an interpersonal power game.  It forces the other person to come groveling back for an explication.  BICBW
> 
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,D1ESjI8GR19j1Rh3lASYntTnDO0r0B1C5dRIy8sF3kqNIzuut5qBiMpMYUdhhySTsBg8rSDQd1GvjX1Pdf59RnFb7cL44FHWQ1LTOLgla-ax5ykVofFJmjr9T3HV&typo=1
> FRIAM-COMIC https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,a0uacZcotBUTwjjbMq1nOtZCsmgZnvO9blGKf_8mGdC5ZnraXfxbPoLONBXy_1GDxYZsZtQ_VLrD-wgZuBj2Zz9Q0xPzN_RpP60UgQGOvr0KRcmjsgMAOg,,&typo=1
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20210125/fe3a146f/attachment.html>