My dad is an acclaimed writer, a ship captain, teacher, novelist, war veteran, the father of 13 children and now 88 years old!  What follows is a shortened version of his article about acronyms that appeared in this news paper last year.
If, during the 20th Century, an American male had been asked to name his brand of underwear, the chances were that he’d answer “BVDs”? And if someone had asked him what BVD stood for, the chances were that he’d answer “I don’t know”? In the 21st Century, things aren’t much different? Whether Jockey, Calvin Klein, Fruit-of-the-Loom, male underwear is still sometimes called BVDs? We live in times when abbreviations and acronyms threaten to demote English a second language.
Curious to learn how wide the A&A (Abbreviations & Acronyms) net had spread, I invoked the aid of Google and Yahoo? The results were astonishing? A Google reference reported that, with duplicates and palindromes thrown in, A&A’s constitute hundreds of thousands of entries? That’s not yet as many as the number of full-bodied words in Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries but the gap is closing!
Many people, obsessed with showing off, use this new language without knowing what the abbreviations mean? It’s one thing to be ignorant; it’s another thing to be pretentiously so, treating new letter combinations as if they were fads to be flaunted like hair styles? And advertisers, particularly those selling over-the-counter drugs, exploit this weakness? On any night of the week, a half-hour exposure to prime-time TV ads can introduce one to a spectrum of such undesirable maladies as ADS, IBS and PMS together with sober warnings that unless we ingest some overpriced chemicals, the kids will end up with the attention span of flies or be plagued by irritated bowels, or premenstrual stress?
Where does “alphabet” fit in all this? It isn’t a palindrome, nor is it an abbreviation? Maybe “alphabet” is an acronym since alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet and beta is the second? Let’s leave it at that and scurry back to ordinary English.
 
Tim Crawford, Professor, Dept. of English Education