Acronym Yourself

LOL, an acronym and the first word in the book, confounded me for a long time. When I started seeing colleagues and friends ending emails with LOL, I wondered, why is a colleague signing off with such an intimate emoticon? When I realized, LOL meant laugh out loud, not lots of love, I laughed. And, then I knew that I needed to pay more attention to acronyms.

In the book, (We Need to Have a Word), Dallas recalls a meeting where he lost a potential client when he didn't know the meaning of HELOC.  Quite arrogant in their dismissal of his services over an acronym. His story reminded me of a colleague using an acronym to sound more in the know then the rest of us.  He talked about SEO and how it was the core to a successful marketing program. I was embarrassed that I didn’t know this “new” technique.  When I finally Googled it, and saw it meant Search Engine Optimization, something I'd been using for years. I felt a bit stupid I didn’t know the acronym, but smart that I had discovered this “hot” marketing technique many years before.  

I know acronyms are used for good.  Such as the medical field to save lives in an emergency.  In my world, they are used to be quicker in writing or conversation. However, what ends up happening is that conversations have to be interrupted to explain the acronym thus losing all of the time it took to us the acronym.  

In a nutshell, acronyms frustrate me.

At the same time, I had fun with the exercise in the book to make your name an acronym.  This lead to way to much time on the web. My first site was to dictionary.com, a good general resource. I was then delighted to find Acronym-Maker.com. Scary that I could spend an hour entering my name just to see what the site could create.  

I found some great acronyms for my name, but none came close to the one my dear friend Catherine created many years ago.  When I’m feeling a bit low, instead of singing "These Are  Few Of My Favorite Things," I read what Catherine wrote:

J is for the jewels which you so richly deserve. It also stands for jubilant, jazzy, just, jolly and jaunty.

A is because you're almost always active. You are also astute, affable appreciative of art, angelic, aesthetically attuned, able ardently admired by all.

N is for your nimble, noble natural self. You are also nice, nifty, neato, not at all narcissistic, but you are just a bit nutty.

It does go on with my last name, but I thought that it would overkill.

Catherine, thank you for such great praise. And, thank you for telling me to get on with this blog and publish.  

I would love for you to create and share an acronym that best describes the state of the U.S.  An existing one, FUBAR, comes quickly to my mind.  I will share them in a later blog. 

Oh, HELOC means Home Equity Line of Credit. Enjoy.