From: charlie@umnstat.stat.umn.edu (Charles Geyer)
Subject: Re: Apostrophes in Plural forms?
Organization: School of Statistics, University of Minnesota
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 23:02:08 GMT

In article <1992Nov19.035118.1018@Princeton.EDU> roger@astro.princeton.edu
(Roger Lustig) writes (replying to me):

> But [scientists] were perverse souls who decided to obfuscate just for the
> hell of it, right?   I think not.  Instead, things may have gotten a little
> more complicated on the scientific front, and the expressions used to
> describe complicated things and process just got too long.  

That is demonstrably not true.  It is purely a matter of modern style.
In medicine, for example, many diseases that had names are being renamed
alphabet soup style, e. g. erythroblastosis fetalis to hemolytic disease
of the newborn (HDN).

Is a PCV valve (to use one of your own examples) more complicated than a
carburator or a butterfly valve?  No, but since it's new it gets a TLA.

> Do you really want to write out "maximum likelihood" or "best linear unbiased
> estimator" or "Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test" every time?  Nor do you, I bet.

You bet wrong.  I explicitly said the exact opposite.  The trouble with you,
Roger, is that you don't pay any attention to what you read before you start
flaming.

Even "maximum likelihood", which I use many times a paper, I spell out each
time.  The language flows better, and I have never had an editor or referee
suggest compressing it with more initialisms.

> Try writing a 20-graf newspaper article on such a topic using van Leunen's
> advice.  Then repeat the exercise with a technical report.

I've never been a newspaper writer and don't ever expect to be one.  I've
done it with technical reports and scientific papers many times.

> Didn't the people who introduced the acronyms and initialisms do so to
> make their lives (and those of the folks around them) simpler?  If this
> hadn't succeeded, would they have continued?

Roger, you have this amazingly panglossian view of the world.  Anything
people say, it is because that is the best of all possible ways to say it.
It never seems to enter your mind that people frequently continue to do
things out of sheer trendiness long after they have become totally
counterproductive.

> "Disease" -- there it is.  When you don't like a phenomenon, don't 
> tell us why it's bad, just insult it and those associated with it.  
> VAX, PCV valve, MRI scan, the GOP, CBS, the USS Iowa -- you must use
> a hundred initialisms and acronyms in a day.  

I doubt I use ten.  Half of those I use disparagingly.

Why does a computer or a computer company have to be named with a TLA?
Did people not buy Stutz Bearcats or Ford Fairlanes or Rolls-Royce Silver
Clouds before initial mania struck?  People even buy Apple Macintoshs,
but I guess they don't count, not being real computers.

PCV valve I knocked above.

MRI scan.  Wonderful.  It used to be NMR scan, but that's now politically
incorrect.  It just goes to show that these things don't always save
time.  The N buried in NMR stood for "nuclear" which was held to scare
patients, hence MRI.  Can you explain why a word for this couldn't
be invented as would have happened if this had been invented 30 years
ago?

As for the others, if the only initialisms in use were as old as GOP and
USS, there wouldn't be any problem.  As I said, it's the bewildering
number of them that's the problem.  No one of them is evil in itself.

> Well, speaking the language of your audience is always a good idea.  
> But why don't you find metonymic terms for the Central Limit Theorem,
> the way van Leunen suggests?

That's your characterization of what van Leunen suggests.  It's not
what she said.  I already said how I avoid spelling out "central limit
theorem" in each place a devotee of initialisms would use "CLT".  It's
not difficult.  It comes to mind immediately as soon as one stops trying
to maximize initialisms and starts trying to minimize them.


-- 
Charles Geyer
School of Statistics
University of Minnesota
charlie@umnstat.stat.umn.edu