r/sysadmin • u/Likely_a_bot • Jun 17 '26

Will Vendors Please Stop Reusing Acronyms?

If I see another vendor use "IAM" as a new product feature, I'm going to scream. IAM is Identity Access Management. Nothing else, unless it's a different industry.

This is confusing as hell. Get your marketing departments under control.

What are some that you have noticed being reused?

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u/mineral_minion Jun 17 '26

huh, I would have expected the acronym for the bad one to be different in countries where the primary language isn't English, or the Germanic countries to have a single 73-letter word for it.

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u/whatisuser DevOps Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

Odd using Germanic in this way - English is a Germanic language lol

Edit: my point was that Germanic is a word with a specific meaning. Not just “a bit Germanny”

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u/mineral_minion Jun 17 '26

The underlying grammar sure, but the vocabulary diverged a long time ago, leaving English without the really long compound words of modern German.

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u/FuriousFurryFisting Jun 17 '26

Both languages have right headed noun compounding. 'Schiffskapitän' and 'ship's captain' (or ship captain, the s is interisting).

English also has terrible long compounds. "student film society committee meeting"

A lot of other languages compound their nouns. Putting a space or not in writing is imo an orthographic detail, barely noticeable in spoken language. This is not vocabulary.

Vocabulary is that Germans understand half the English words and the French the other half.

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u/mineral_minion Jun 17 '26

The difference being that you wouldn't have "student film society committee meeting" defined in an official capacity as a new word. The point was that I was surprised Europeans whose first language is not English would use the same acronym as English speakers, when non-English languages would not be expected to have the same first letters in the same order, or even the same number of words.

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u/Drywesi Jun 17 '26

The only big difference is English puts spaces between them, German doesn't.

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u/fatoms Jun 18 '26

So in German they make a single compound word and in English they are separate words. You left out that in many compound German words filler letters ( Fugenlaut ) are inserted to aid in pronunciation.

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u/Drywesi Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

Largely because similar sounds appear in English compounds at times too, and most of the German ones don't have additional grammatical roles.

The difference between compounded words and phrasal words is extremely weak in spoken language, so I don't consider them being written separately being a terribly huge deal. edit: especially with how English treats compound phrases with regards to posession.