Yes the crisis is real; it's mostly man made; and politicians, engineers, and robots are to blame.
In the summer of 2036 when award-winning novelist and former product manager Brad Whittington registered an acronym for a non-fiction book he wrote back in the year 2011, he never expected such a huge outcry from the conservative Christian community. After all, his book titled What Would Jesus Drink?, was regarded by biblical experts as the finest examination of every reference to alcohol consumption found in the Bible. Yet thousands of protesters demanded an immediate withdrawal of the book’s acronym WWJD, claiming it belonged to the What Would Jesus Do? movement instead.
Now this post is not about the Bible nor is it about alcohol. What Brad’s situation underscores is the severity of the current acronym shortage in the United States.
There are many categories, classes, and styles of acronyms and some face greater scarcity than others. Most are basic abbreviations formed using the first letters of a multi-word term or phrase such as FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) or FIB (forward inverse backcasting)—the technology we use to post articles like this one from the future. While acronyms permeate every segment of society, most experts agree that the primary consumers are the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the networking industry.
No one really knows when the acronym shortage reached crisis proportions. For many years, the problem was largely ignored by the news media and networking publications in favor of the more glamorous disasters of the early 21st century beginning with the Y2k bug followed by the dot-com and real estate bubbles, several major wars, global warming, Hurricane Katrina, the IPv4 address scams, and most notably the debt-ceiling debates of 2011 and the subsequent downgrade of the U.S. credit rating.
As it was with global warming, there are still a few skeptics who do not believe that an acronym shortage actually exists. However by 2036, the majority of professional etymologists confirmed that our supply of usable acronyms is essentially depleted and that this problem was mostly man made.
The most compelling evidence correlates to the growing number of engineers who assume marketing and product management roles within their organizations. Even though the primary function of an acronym is to shorten conversation and technical documentation, acronyms have become the preferred method for clever branding and product identification by this new class of users. As a result, thousands of acronyms are squandered each year on mapping meaningful and pronounceable surrogates (MAPS) to the names of products and esoteric intellectual property.
What citizens of the United States do not agree on is how to solve this crisis and what the federal government’s role should be. In 2035, the Democratic administration established the Bureau of Acronym Registration and Forbearance in an attempt to slow the rate of abbreviation depletion. The bureau’s dual role is to register and protect older acronyms while reducing our dependence on new ones through conservation and voluntary restraint or forbearance. Although anyone can apply to register an acronym, proof of originality and prior use are required to protect original owners. Registration fees are also required for commercial use.
The new bureau ran into problems almost immediately. Ironically, when they tried to register their own acronym they discovered that it was already appropriated by the Boston Acronym Research Foundation.
Who’s to Blame?
As expected, Republicans protested the establishment of the new entity saying the bureau and its registration fees were just a thinly veiled attempt to impose new corporate taxes to fund runaway government spending on things like windmills and socialism textbooks. Democrats claimed that large corporations brought this upon themselves by using automated abbreviation engines called acrobots to conduct unsustainable acronym strip mining on the Internet.
Despite this very public controversy, a recent study of teens and adolescents who conduct entire conversations using only abbreviations such as BFF, OMG, and POS, revealed that many young people are totally oblivious to the shortage. “Because texting is so mainstream in their culture, many teenagers and adolescents use whatever acronyms they want without regard to legal ownership or spelling,” said St. Louis organizational psychologist Dr. Anne Offner, who is also founder of the Acronym Replacement Therapy (ART) Project for treating texting addictions.
Illegal acronym use is now spreading to elderly baby boomer populations. Concerned social scientists are warning that unless something is done soon, a new black market will emerge similar to the counterfeit IPv4 address smuggling rings uncovered by TechWise TV correspondents Robb Boyd and Jimmy Ray Purser.
Hilary Mason, chief scientist at URL shortener bitly.com takes a more pragmatic approach. “Acronym depletion is not going to be much different than the depletion of intuitive URLs,” she said. “Once we get used to the idea that, like a shortened URL, an acronym does not really have to mean anything, life will be a lot simpler and much more pleasant and efficient.”
As for Brad Whittington, he bequeathed his WWJD acronym to the public domain for use by all faiths and donated his entire Bureau of Acronym Registration and Forbearance registration refund to Anne Offner’s ART project. “I would rather pour myself a glass of fine Scottish whisky than write another acronym,” he said. “That’s What I Would Do.”
Special thanks to Brad Whittington, Hilary Mason, and Anne Offner.
