The American Acronym
Or, LoOPY: The Land of Oz Precedes You
It’s a common, petty frustration, isn’t it?
To read a comment or text, maybe from a friend or in a subreddit you’re consulting for help, then finding whoever wrote it included an acronym they didn’t bother to write out. What the hell does “EMD” stand for? What’s “SRT”? “JNS”?
I made those up, but I found terms for them all. Multiple, even.
There are two types of acronyms, the intuitive and the obfuscatory. An ‘intuitive’ acronym has compositional words that come together to spell out a name or phrase hinting at its own meaning, and sometimes the words themselves are only really included to facilitate that name. The obfuscatory acronym, on the other hand, forms a series of letters with its words that in no way suggests its meaning and can often appear as gibberish, and sometimes the words themselves leave the meaning unclear.
“MADD”, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is more intuitive than not, because of course these mothers are mad at drunk drivers. “IMAX” is another intuitive one, officially short for “image maximum”, but really it evokes the ‘maximization’ of the ‘eye’ with a really big screen. “STEM” is fairly fitting too, short for ‘science, tech, engineering, and math”, subtly suggesting these fields are the backbone of a growing society from which all other avenues and interests diverge from or depend upon. “USAID” is self-explanatory: aid from the US, though “AID” here stands for “Agency for International Development” — funny, it would be too crude to just let “AID” directly mean itself.
On the other hand: “NASA”, despite our common knowledge of what it stands for, doesn’t explain itself at all. Neither does “BYOB”, “LMFAO”, or “BBQ”, whose meanings we only know from their ubiquity. On the other hand, you’re less likely to understand what “EOD” means without knowing more about its context of use. Does it stand for “end of day”, as in business emails? “Explosive ordnance disposal”, as with the police or military? Oh, it stands for “Earth overshoot day” too. Okay.
There’s a meme that circulated in black online spaces some time ago, just in text, where you’re prompted to understand a long acronym without being told what it stands for. It was: “GYBAITGDHRNBIBYMFA”. For those who can clock its meaning, it’s meant to poke fun at the common presence of the language it represents, but the joke is also accompanied by an awareness that not as many people outside the intended audience would understand it.
Acronyms ostensibly function as a shortcut, but are they really worth the time they save? Having to explain one takes up more time than never having used it, and a misunderstanding borne of one’s usage can delay things at a far greater timescale. And yet, they continue to be used, because they still have a deeper purpose as a subtle, even unintentional, practice of gatekeeping communication from those not already in the know. Their use can fuse communication with exclusion, something at the heart of the acronym’s American quality, at the heart of America itself.
We often blame the internet for ripping open the fabric of society with a Babel-like proliferation of “echo chambers” and “social bubbles”, but what I believe it really did was merely amplify a weakly re-emerging signal within American civility.
America is built on exclusivity. Country clubs, secret societies, company towns, Freemasons and Quakers, Jehova’s Witnesses and the Church of Scientology, WACO, the Zizians, gated communities, ethnic enclaves, sundown towns, America is a fertile landscape for social islands. The idea that there could be such a thing as a unifying monoculture in the US was the product of its immediate postwar consumer society, traditions and norms constructed ad hoc by ad men, their free market hunting grounds only maintained by an historically high tax rate for the wealthy. That is, our cherished “normalcy”, which the late 2010s internet finally killed, was always only a temporary, if multigenerational, departure from the American default.
Before this, what was the defining American analog in fiction? It was The Land of Oz, created by author Frank L. Baum, which represented the eclectic and disorienting quality of settler America more honestly and directly than anything designed by postwar consensus-reality media. Nothing is really unified in Oz, not even its stories, unlike with the monomythic structures of The Lord of the Rings or the stabilizing religious themes of The Chronicles of Narnia — both British, not American. And unlike the famous British fantasies, characters in the Oz novels don’t necessarily have a historically rationalized lore as do the Elves or walking tree “ents” of Lord of the Rings, nor do they directly represent anything as would Aslan (Christ) or the White Witch (Satan) from Narnia. In these novels, characters with little background or direct thematic significance tend to be the protagonists: the peripheral Hobbits in Rings, the real-world children in Narnia. But in the Oz novels, a character like Dorothy has much more historical and thematic familiarity for us than anybody else she encounters, as the inhabitants of the land of Oz are weirder and harder to clock at first sight. We know Dorothy is an American girl, complete with a naive rudeness (at least in the books); we know nothing about the historical context or immediate symbolic significance of the witch her house crushes.
