"If You Don't Stand for Something, You'll Fall for Anything" *

In this fast-paced world, why should we take the time to form whole words, when an acronym will do? (ha ha!) An acronym is a word made from the initial letters of other words. Breaking it up, we find that it comes from the Greek akros ("beginning") and onyma ("name").

Some common ones are:

LASER
Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation

NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NASA
National Aeronautics & Space Administration

SNAFU
(Not polite to list what this one stands for! Suffice it to say, it is used to describe a situation that has gone horribly wrong.)

RADAR
RAdio Detection And Ranging

WASP
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

RSVP
Repondez S'il Vous Plait (French for "Please get back to me and let me know if you're coming so that I don't prepare all kinds of stuff and then you don't show up!")

SONAR
Sound Navigation And Ranging

If you have any affiliation with the military, you are more than familiar with acronyms!

TDY
Temporary DutY

BX
Base EXchange

PT
Physical Training

LES
Leave and Earnings Statement

RAF
Royal Air Force

Computers have impacted our everyday lives so much that many people are now familiar with technical acronyms:

CPU
Central Processing Unit

RAM
Random Access Memory

HTML
HyperText Markup Language

MIDI
Musical Instrument Digital Interface

WYSIWYG (pronounced "wizzy wig")
What You See Is What You Get

E-mail and cyberchat rooms have made acronyms a necessity, as they facilitate quick conversation (even if that conversation looks like alphabet soup on the screen)...

IMHO
In My Humble Opinion

BTW
By The Way

LOL
Laughing Out Loud

ROTFL
Rolling On The Floor Laughing (really, though, just how many ways do we need to get it through to someone in cyberspace that we found something really, really funny?!)

* This quote is attributed to Malcolm X; however, its inclusion here does not indicate an endorsement on my part of any of his ideals and/or principles. (Translation: I liked the quote and it fit the article, but I'm not an "X" fan!)

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