When does an abbreviation stop being one?

Scientific abbreviations are getting longer, and Russ Swan’s patience is getting shorter…so much so that a recent abridgement caused a Carry-on style kerfuffle…

I have a growing problem with abbreviations, and the problem is they are growing. Within science and in general life, abbreviations are becoming longer and longer. At this rate we will reach the abbreviation inversion point (AIP) – at which abbreviations become longer than the phrases they replace – sometime in the next few years.

There are suggestions that we are already there. The advent of the world wide web brought with it easy access to the total sum of human knowledge, along with the most inefficient abbreviation in human history: www. This simple initialism is nine syllables long, three times the length of the phrase it abbreviates.

Even the word abbreviation is hardly economical, but that is just one of many delightful quirks of language. This is, after all, a system in which the word short is longer than the word long. It was never designed that way, because it was never designed.

With abbrevs we have the opportunity to increase efficiency. But do we? It seems that, no sooner is a new shorthand expression created then we try our damnedest to lengthen it again.

Look around the lab, and what do you see? Your chromatograph may be an HPLC, or a UHPLC. Next year it might be a SUHPLC, or an iUHPLC-S. I’ve just made those up, but admit it: you wouldn’t be surprised if the next instrument sales rep to knock on your door was offering something that sounded like that. There’s even a space on the bench for it, between your Maldi-Tof and your STEM.

I’m old enough to remember when one of the main funding bodies in our business was the Science Research Council or SRC. This was reinvented as the SERC before taking on its current identity as the EPSRC in 1994. That’s 66 percent more abbreviation for your money, even if there isn’t 66 percent more research grant for your abbreviation.

I was recently involved in a project concerning medical devices (for, naturally, an organisation known by an acronym), and came across so many wonderfully lengthy and impenetrable abbreviations such as NatSSIPs, the National Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures, that I had to compile a spreadsheet to understand them.

Science is far from the only realm in which the phenomenon of abbreviation inflation is taking over. In the military, in education, and in politics, there seems no end to the opportunities to create abbreviations that are neither succinct nor illuminating. Some of them aren’t even very clever, such as the new incumbent 'Potus', known in longhand as a statement of incredulity: That Really Unpleasant Man is President.

Financial types have their own range of impenetrably-long abbrevs. Just this morning (as I write), some accountancy wonk was droning on during the financial news about some corporation’s annual results. It’s EBITDA (ee-bit-dah) was up or down by some percent or other, we learned, only to be interrupted by the show’s host seeking clarification: What is ee-bit-dah? I got as far as ‘earnings before interest…’ before my own interest waned and the off switch proved too much of a temptation.

There may be a reader of Lab News who understands and appreciates the difference between this number and the company’s revenue, but frankly it’s meaningless and the abbreviation not only serves no purpose, it is positively counter-productive. Simply introducing and then explaining it took much longer than just saying how much they sold.

In their favour, abbrevs offer plenty of potential for hilarity. My screen was recently assailed by a report from the City University of New York, about a presentation on language being delivered at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Yes, the professor is a linguist and yes, she works at CUNY, but ‘CUNY linguist to speak on second language acquisition’ was not the headline I expected to read over my morning beverage.

It was almost enough to make me roffle.

[box type="shadow" ] Scientific terminology: rewired Last month we invited you to send us your best scientific neologisms – and what a fantastic response we had! Thank you to all that entered…here are some of our favourites:

• NMR (En Em Ma) – Cure for constipation. Dennis Wright of DAWTECH
• Cilia – more foolish Herpetology – Scientific study of women’s pets
• Observatory – keep an eye on a Conservative
• Virus – to visit us on the way to somewhere else. Georgina Godwin-Keene a Senior Environmental Industrial Microbiologist at CABI
• Laboratory – a Conservative talking dog
• Element – Interpreting Ella. Gordon Nicoll, Section Manager of the Blood Sciences Department at Borders General Hospital
• Electric – vote for the magician (elect- trick) Euan Nicoll, Gordon’s son (well done Euan!)

But the grand winner has to be... Georgina Godwin-Keene – for her entry: Protein – in favour of adolescents. Well done Georgina! [/box]

Russ Swan