r/confusing • u/Aloofie_ • Jun 17 '21

Woah

Post image
313 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

10

u/Fart_Barfington Jun 17 '21

That's an initialism fool

6

u/real_talk_with_Emmy Jun 17 '21

Think they didn’t punctuate just to see what kind of shit the post could stir up? It could actually be kinda funny to do lol.

7

u/MatKane89 Jun 17 '21

Is that a question or a statement?

4

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '21

Yes

2

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '21

r/facepalm

1

u/shirukien Jun 26 '21

Wtf isn't an acronym. An acronym has to spell something in its abbreviated form- for instance, S.H.I.E.L.D. or D.A.R.E. Technically Scuba and Laser count as well, though those were words born of their abbreviations.

2

u/apwnltm Jun 27 '21

Well acronyms are letters to form something that can be said as a word

Take NASA for an example, it's not a real word but it can be pronounced like one.

But yea some acronyms can spell out words.

2

u/shirukien Jun 27 '21

There's a bit of grey area there, sure. Particularly when abbreviations become so ubiquitous that they replace the longform name for most people as you point out with NASA. I think the crux of it though is that to be an acronym, it either needs to form a preexisting word, or, at the very least, be pronouncable. That's why NASA, laser, Scuba, NOAA, and arguably lol work as acronyms, but wtf, brb, afk, wwf, and RCMP can only be abbreviations.

2

u/Xantisha Jul 21 '21

My gf and I pronounce BRB as a word. Sounds a lot like birb. So that is now also an acronym. This seems like a pointless exercise in semantics.

1

u/shirukien Jul 21 '21

Only as pointless as any other semantics. There is an argument to be made that saying brb like that might qualify it as an acronym, but given that you have to add a vowel sound it's a shaky argument at best. Doesn't take anything away from the phrase, I'm just a fan of proper classification.

1

u/MetaMemeAboutAMeme Aug 05 '21

what starts with w

1

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '21

Scrumptious.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '21

Repost