Acronyms and words

 

This past week I was at a conference and during a lunch break we had a very interesting conversation with regard to acronyms and words in general. We were talking about how one word or acronym can have several meanings. This conversation also leads into how IT people seem to have their own language and a lot of other people have no idea what they are saying.

It was a lot of fun just sitting and listening to some of the conversation because even IT people have a hard time understanding other IT individuals because of the words that they use. We were talking about how you explain something to senior management in terms that they understand and move it away from the technical terms. This conversation was a lot of fun, as I am one of those that doesn’t understand the technical terms very often and need it in simpler terms. It was nice to have this conversation with a bunch of technical people because they agreed with me. Technical people must understand that they have their own language and not everyone will understand what they are saying.

The conversation also went into the messages that IT individuals write for the end-users and how confusing they can be. Most end-users don’t understand the technical terms, but some IT individuals write their messages as if everyone should understand what they are saying and if they don’t that end-user must be stupid. Yes, I have heard someone in IT say that if an end-user doesn’t understand the message, they are just stupid and don’t understand anything. I read a message from this IT person, and even I had a hard time figuring out what they were saying, and I understood the product they were talking about.

I know that this doesn’t just apply to the IT field because most other fields have their own language and terms and if you are not part of that field, it’s hard to follow a discussion. So, when you are talking to someone that is not in your specific expertise remember to try and remove some of the terms that are unique and put in some different words, and it might help everyone.

 

Acronyms

Have you noticed that in the world today there are so many acronyms and you almost need a dictionary just to keep track of all of them. Could you imagine the size of the dictionary that would be required for the acronyms. Even with the various ones I see through IT it would be rather large.

When it comes to acronyms the challenge is that the same two or three letters can be used for a bunch of different things. We ran into a situation a while ago with one simple acronym meaning something that we didn't expect in the IT world. Now the one I am talking about is DC. No I am not talking about the District of Columbia in the states but three different meanings in IT that I know of.

• DC = direct current, domain controller and data centre

That is only one of the many different acronyms that I have found that in IT there can be more than one meaning depending on who you are talking to. What gets me is when people throw in the various acronyms thinking that the person they are talking to understands the term they are meaning. We have been in many different conversations and of course I had a different meaning of the acronym then the person saying it meant.

When you are writing and using the acronyms especially in a document or email, it is very important to define the term and show the acronym, after the term, at the beginning of your document. This ensures that everyone has the same meaning that you are intending them to be thinking of. In the case of DC it was used in an entire document without it being defined and it took us the longest time to realize they were talking about Data Centre as we had never head DC used that way before.

If you are going to use acronyms please make sure that the people that are getting the message will know what abbreviation you are using. Even if you are in the same industry remember that the meaning that you are using may not be the one that the receive is thinking of.