Originally published 21 May 1990
Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), chose PCR technology as the “major scientific development” (MSD) of 1989.
Quick! For what is PCR an acronym?
If you answered “polymerase chain reaction” award yourself a gold star. Next question: What is a polymerase chain reaction? Uh?
Somehow 1989’s MSD got lost in its acronym. Indeed, a good part of science is drowning in alphabet soup. The editorial pages of Science, as well as other journals, are becoming display boards of capital letters. AAAS should do something about it.
The HST has a good chance of becoming the MSD of 1990, so if you don’t yet recognize the acronym for Hubble Space Telescope, now’s the time to learn it. And while you’re at it, you might as well get a jump on things with the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). It’s sure to be a MSD somewhere down the line.
An economy of words
There is, I suppose, some measure of economy to be gained by printing the full antecedent of an acronym only once in an article and thereafter using a cluster of CAPS. Thus, in a recent Science article the Environmental Protection Agency becomes EPA, and no one objects to that. But when in the same article, the Navajo Generating Station (wherever that is) becomes NGS with equal frequency, one wonders if the acronym has not bestowed an unwarranted status upon its recipient. Not to mention the loss of linguistic grace.
Whenever acronyms get out of hand both grace and meaning suffer. Another recent story in Science described a confrontation between an environmental group called Friends Aware of Wildlife Needs (FAWN) and enthusiasts of off-road vehicles (ORVs). The resulting clash of acronyms, pitting FAWN against ORVs, reads like something by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Even the advertising pages in science journals swim in acronyms. Unlike the editorial pages, advertising copy seldom provides antecedents. One ad touts the advantages of an ASPEC for your HPLC without of hint of what those things might be. Oh well, if you have to ask, you probably don’t need one.
Terminal acronym syndrome (TAS) is a disease that science no doubt contracted from government, which itself became mortally infected during FDR’s administration. Every scientist knows what NSF, NIH, DOD, DOE, and NASA stand for because those are the government agencies that dish out the bucks. NSF (National Science Foundation) has a healthy ring to it, but ADAMHA (Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration) sounds like a TAS patient’s expiring gasp.
Acronym quiz
Scientific literacy these days requires familiarity with a vast zoo of upper-case beasts. For how many of the following acronyms can you provide the antecedent: AIDS, ARPANET, ASCII, CAD/CAM, CAT-scan, CERN, HDTV, IVF, MIRV, MOSFET, NMR, REM-sleep, SDI, SETI, SST, ZPG. If you can come up with more than four, award yourself a second gold star (answers below).
Many of today’s unfamiliar acronyms will trip glibly off tomorrow’s tongue. Here’s a list of old-timers that no one today has trouble with: DDT, DNA, ESP, ICBM, IQ, LSD, PC, TV, UFO, VCR. You may have forgotten, or perhaps never knew, the antecedents for some of these acronyms, but if you can’t give a reasonable definition for all of them, give back one gold star.
An acronym has really made it into the language when its capital letters revert to lower case. Bit, laser, and radar are words that used to jump off the page in flashy CAPS and now, like old money, do their best to blend in. Bit comes from BInary digiT (or maybe Binary digIT?), laser from Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and radar from … uh, it’s been so long I’ve forgotten.
Science has been mostly free of the tendency of organizations to adopt names with meaningful acronyms (FAWN, MADD, DARE), and for that we should count our blessings. The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) tucked a bit of clever humor into its acronym, but the humor is probably lost on the scientific hucksters the organization tries to police.
Perhaps AAAS or NSF should establish a Board to Assure Basic Elegance in Language to monitor the proliferating use of acronyms in science — and to seek a cure for TAS. One of the first things the board would try to do is print its newsletter entirely in lower case. That could be the MSD for 1990.
(Answers to acronym quiz: AIDS=acquired immune deficiency syndrome; ARPANET=Advanced Research Projects Agency Network; ASCII=American Standard Code for Information Interchange; CAD/CAM=Computer-Aided Design/Manufacturing; CAT=Computer-Aided Tomography; CERN=Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire; HDTV=High Definition Television; IVF=In vitro fertilization; MIRV=Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicles; MOSFET=Metal-Oxide-Silicon Field-Effect Transistor; NMR=Nuclear Magnetic Resonance; REM=Rapid Eye Movement; SDI=Strategic Defense Initiative; SETI=Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence; SST=Supersonic Transport; ZPG=Zero Population Growth.)
