{"id":260,"date":"2006-03-07T11:12:43","date_gmt":"2006-03-07T03:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=260"},"modified":"2010-06-21T18:03:14","modified_gmt":"2010-06-21T10:03:14","slug":"tlas-aka-singapores-fetish-with-acronyms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/general\/tlas-aka-singapores-fetish-with-acronyms-260","title":{"rendered":"TLAs - aka Singapore&#8217;s fetish with acronyms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was staggered in my first months in Singapore. Almost everything becomes an acronym.<\/p>\n<p>On the first day in my job here, I had to try to figure what everyone was talking about, as the following flowed easily:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>PIE (Pan Island Expressway)<\/li>\n<li>ECE (Electronics and Computer Engineering)<\/li>\n<li>AET (Academic Excellence Team)<\/li>\n<li>HDB (Housing Development Board)<\/li>\n<li>ERP (Electronic Road Pricing)<\/li>\n<li>MRT (Mass Rapid transit)<\/li>\n<li>PAP (People's Action Party)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And there were many more.<\/p>\n<p>You will notice that all the examples above share an important characteristic. They are all TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms)...<\/p>\n<p>These days, I try to convince writers to avoid acronyms. They are a severe impediment to understanding.<\/p>\n<p>Today was a classic case. The acronym \"DIQ\" was in an email to me on discipline issues. I asked a few people what \"DIQ\" was and no-one seemed to know. I asked the author of the email and she replied \"Discipline Inquiry\". Go figure.<\/p>\n<p><b>Footnote 1: <\/b> Wak - I used 2 TLAs in the heading for this post. It's getting to me...<\/p>\n<p><b>Footnote 2: <\/b> My favourite Singapore acronym is \"BGR\". This is a particularly relevant problem for angst-ridden teenagers. It stands for \"boy girl relations\". <\/p>\n<p class=\"alt\"><a href=\"#respond\" id=\"comms\">Be the first to comment<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was staggered in my first months in Singapore. Almost everything becomes an acronym. On the first day in my job here, I had to try to figure what everyone was talking about, as the following flowed easily: PIE (Pan Island Expressway) ECE (Electronics and Computer Engineering) AET (Academic Excellence Team) HDB (Housing Development Board) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}