Acronuym Amnesia — oh lord I meant acronym, ugh

This week­end I was sit­ting with my friend Kathy Gill at a house warm­ing party and we got onto the sub­ject of the evo­lu­tion of markup lan­guages. Aside from mak­ing most of the geeks in the vicin­ity cringe at “work talk” on a Sat­ur­day, we were run­ning at top speed through the jun­gle of acronyms that have been spawned by 10+ years of web based markup lan­guages. Until I stum­bled. Kathy men­tioned (I think it was…) XSLT (or was it some­thing else?) and I drew a com­plete blank. More than a blank in fact, I com­pletely lost the abil­ity to parse any of the acronyms that we had been using and all con­nec­tion between the let­ters and the words that they stood for.

Sim­ple over­load. I’ve never been able to reli­ably type or say RDF rather than RFD and now it seems that I may some­day (soon) lose the abil­ity to cope with any acronym.

Can’t hap­pen soon enough as far as I’m con­cerned. Per­haps if we (I) lose the abil­ity to abbre­vi­ate any ran­domly long obtuse string of words and pre­tend that the result­ing alpha­bet soup is mean­ing­ful we will have to more care­fully con­sider what we name things and strive for con­ci­sion and mean­ing in usable packages.