The Agonies of Acronymania

Today's acronyms, designed to be time-and labor-saving devices, are often harder to use than the words they are meant to replace. Consider the monsters that the Navy alone has spawned: EP-DOPAC (Enlisted Personnel Distribution Office-Pacific Fleet) and PAMIPAC (Personnel Accounting Machine Installation-Pacific Fleet). Worse, they have now grown so prolific that MAD may stand for anything from Mutual Assured Destruction to the New York Stock Exchange symbol for the Madison Fund --with 13 other alternatives in between.

Constant Hazard. The very word acronym is a neologism, which a Bell Laboratories researcher created in 1943 from the Greek akros (tip) and onyma (name). By 1960, when the Gale Research Company of Detroit published the first edition of what is now called Acronyms and Initialisms Dictionary (lumping wordlike acronyms with unpronounceable abbreviations) 12,000 of both were already on the loose. This summer's third edition will list more than 80,000. Nor is English the only language to be acronymized. The Library of Congress publishes a glossary of 23,600 Russian acronyms and abbreviations, ranging from the familiar MIG plane (designed in part by Mikhail losifovich Gurevich) to AGITPROP (for Agitation and Propaganda Department).

Planned to save words in print and speech, acronyms have created new ones instead (radar, sonar, loran) and even corrupted spelling, producing "snick" out of SNCC and "rotsy" from ROTC. Today inappropriate acronyms are a constant hazard. When the Nixon Administration set up its new Office of Management and Budget (OMB), for example, it seemed clear that the awkward initials were invented to avoid the more logical name. Bureau of Management and Budget (BOMB). Military men seldom avoid such errors. The Army is especially prone to fatuous acronyms like BAMBI, which stands for Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept. Some civilian agencies are equally dense: ACHE (Alabama Commission on Higher Education), or something the Albuquerque payroll office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs calls Wage and Manpower Process Utilizing Machines, which tactlessly yields WAMPUM. From conservationists: FOE (Friends of the Earth) and ACNE (Alaskans Concerned for Neglected Environments).

SAC, SACC and SAK.

The worst hazard is the acronym's tendency to create doubles. As soon as an acronym becomes common, it breeds a litter of identical children. When a man says that he works for AID, is he part of the Agency for International Development or Americans of Italian Descent? Perhaps he is a doctor concerned with Artificial Insemination by Donor, or a lexicographer employed by the Acronyms and Initialisms Dictionary, which now lists 18 different AIDs.

Even the Strategic Air Command must compete with other SACs, from sprayed acoustical ceiling to the Society of the Catholic Apostolate--not to mention SACC (either Supplemental Air Carrier Conference or Supporting Arms Coordination Center) and SAK (a Finnish trade union confederation called Suomen Ammattiliittojen Keskuslitto).

Ironically, people have a natural reluctance to clutter their memories with clusters of letters. Even those in the midst of the highest acronymic concentrations occasionally lose one. During the Apollo 12 mission, according to The Washington Monthly, controllers discovered that a minor malfunction was due to something called the Digital Uplink Assembly. "We think we've figured it out--your DUA was off," they radioed to the vicinity of the moon. Replied Apollo: "What is a DUA?"

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