Acronyms by Nancy L. Eady

The other day I thought I was going to be late enough to work that my co-workers might worry about me, so I sent an email with the title “RLFNGR.” In the body of the email, I wrote “Running late for no good reason,” and then gave my projected arrival time. When I got to the office, our receptionist, a young man in his late 20’s/early 30’s, greeted me with a cheerful, “I liked the acronym in your email!” I rounded the corner to my office, where his mother works across from me, and she said, “I sure am glad you told me what that meant!” I started to laugh. I told her that people our receptionist’s age or younger seem to love acronyms, while people our age want to have them defined. 

The conversation reminded me of a song that came out about twelve years ago, when Kayla was young enough to listen to Disney Radio, and we would sometimes listen together. 

It was a bouncy, peppy little song, with the chorus:

Be, be, be my bff,

Cause IDK what's coming next, 

LMHO with the rest,

So TTYLXOX.

At the time, I had no idea what it meant, but I was intrigued enough to remember the lyrics. Once I realized that “Be, be, be” was a repeat of the verb “be” rather than an acronym for the Better Business Bureau, understanding the chorus got easier. “Bff” stands for best friend forever, “IDK” means “I don’t know” and LMHO stands for “laughing my head off.” “TTYLXOX” stands for "talk to you later, hugs and kisses." Had that song come out today, most of those acronyms would be familiar to me.

The federal government is fond of acronyms. I gave an online seminar the other day on autonomous vehicles and as part of my research for it, I looked over two National Transportation Safety Board investigation reports and a report from the Congressional Research Service. Each document had a full page-length or longer glossary solely dedicated to guiding the reader through the alphabet soup of governmental acronyms. 

While acronyms are probably unavoidable in “real life,” I am not a fan of them in fiction unless they are exceptionally well-known such as “FBI” or “CDC.” If I don’t understand the acronym, it pulls me out of the story and forces me to figure it out or look up what it means. A better person would just skim over it and keep reading but I am not such a person.  An undefined acronym drives me crazy, almost as crazy as material from an advertiser with a random asterisk stuck by a term or item, and nothing anywhere in the literature explaining what that poor lonely asterisk means. 

Do you ever use acronyms in your fiction? In what settings or situations do you think acronyms might work?