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An alphabet of conditions?

TheCatWoman

I get very confused by all the abreviations used for the various things we have and my brain makes some rather strange interpretations of what these could mean, like EUPD, European Union Police Dept, its never anything even vaguely medical. Are we at risk of being overrun with alphabets describing us, do they become meaningless after a while?

Parents
  • TheCatWoman said:
    do they become meaningless after a while

    Maybe they save a bit of typing. They also describe particular clusters of traits or experiences that are relatable to others, at least more generally. I don't feel they are meaningless, though. Imagine if this forum was hosted by the "National Society for People Who Feel Different", it wouldn't really have much focus. So, I'm not really against labels or their abbreviations.

    Some labels get a bit tainted (like Asperger's Syndrome), or become very stigmatising (like Borderline Personality Disorder, not to be confused with the Boston Police Department), so their names get changed (to ASD and EUPD). I also guess that the people who write the diagnostic criteria like to change things just because they can point at them and say, "Look! That was my idea!" This is also the reason why large projects often end in disaster—too many cooks. Sometimes it's better to just leave things as they are.

    Anyway, while on the "police" theme, how about these?

    • ASD: Always Seeking Donuts
    • ADHD: Always Determined to Hunt for Donuts
  • in reply to Damojo

    Good ones Damo.

    I know it would be very cumbersome to have to type everything out in full all the time, but it takes my brain a while to catch up with acronyms and abbreviations, I hope nobody thinks I was trying to be dismissive of thier conditions, because I wasn't, I just have AOL, or alphabet overload, lol.

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  • in reply to Damojo

    Good ones Damo.

    I know it would be very cumbersome to have to type everything out in full all the time, but it takes my brain a while to catch up with acronyms and abbreviations, I hope nobody thinks I was trying to be dismissive of thier conditions, because I wasn't, I just have AOL, or alphabet overload, lol.

Children
  • in reply to Stuart333

    That reminds me of something I read before: the biggest threat to the IT industry is that there are only 17,576 possible TLAs. Wink

    (For the uninitiated, TLAs = Three-Letter Acronyms).

  • in reply to TheCatWoman

    You'd have no chance in telecoms. When I first started I had to spend days just learning TLAs (three letter acronyms) just to read the first paragraph of a document. There are hundreds you have to know in cellular. They ran out of unique ones, so some have multiple meanings based on context just to make it harder, and some need 4, 5 or more letters.

    Some have been used for so long people even forget what they stand for, but you just know what they mean.