The dictionary informs me that an acronym is a word formed from initial letters of other words. As the decades of my life add up, I find that my life is cluttered with acronyms. Some acronyms are deeply embedded in my mind. NSDAP was an acronym for the name of Hitler’s political party. It stood for Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei. In English, National Socialistic German Labor Party. Members of that party would sooner or later become known as the infamous Nazis. My parents were not members of any party. We were poor and so it did not matter. Some of the wealthy people had a choice. They could join the NSDAP or become poor like us. In 1939 Goebbels gave the Youth of Germany to Hitler as a birthday present, and membership in the Hitler Youth became compulsory. I became a member of the BDM (Bund Deutscher Maedels, roughly translated as Alliance of German Girls). Those acronyms of my youth stood for submission, and I did not like to submit.

BC and AD were international acronyms. I loved history, and I understood BC to mean before Christ and AD, anno Domini, to mean after the birth of Christ. They have now been changed to BCE, Before the Common Era (the former BC), and CE, the Common Era (formerly AD). There is no information on, or a definition of, that Common Era. Acronyms change, which is a sign that they are alive and well.

When I became a college student, married with children, I was introduced to academic terms. I was scheduled to complete a BS degree, also known as Bachelor of Science. Science was a small part of what was required to learn. Eventually I would complete an MS, and the only reason I did not reach for that fabled PhD was that I needed to earn money and leaving my family in order to earn a degree was out of the question. Friends and acquaintances laughed a lot about those acronyms. My brother-in-law informed me that BS implied something that the bulls excrete. And when I completed my MS, I was informed that MS stood for More-of-the-Same. PhD, I was told, simply meant Piled-Higher-and-Deeper.

During my lengthy teaching career, I learned that the academic world could crank out acronyms faster than I cared to commit them to memory. Students were no longer students. They were labels. There were EMH (Educable Mentally Handicapped), LD (Learning Disabled), and BD (Behavior Disordered), not to mention ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). Acronyms, I felt, were as prolific as the bacillus that causes the common cold.

When it comes to the computer, acronyms are in a dead heat with the dreaded computer virus. No, I did not know what a PDF File was. I only knew it had little to do PDQ. PDF, Mary tells me, is the acronym for Portable Document Format, a format that any operating system can use. That little tidbit came from a phone conversation with Mary Phillips on how I could possibly remember exactly how I scanned parts of a manuscript. By now I have pounded the keys so many times, scanning black and white negatives and digital pictures, as well as those photographs my kids refer to as the GO (Golden Oldies), that I’ve forgotten how to scan anything that isn’t a TIFF.

Mary suggested I go to my programs and see if there was any software. Thank heaven I did not forget what software is. Of course, there was something called a Smart Panel. I had seen that type of thing before and scorned it as being too elementary. At Mary’s coaxing, I went there. The last time I had seen anything looking like the Smart Panel, it was a cartoon of a little bus with little people showing the landscape of what a scanner can do. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. The Smart Panel turned out to be rather useful and, again, full of acronyms. Mary patiently persuaded me to read those acronyms out loud. There were PIM and PDA, and something to do with the Web. I wanted to quit, but Mary kept saying, “Keep going.” I had covered only eight acronyms when the magic letters came up: Number nine was OCR. That prompted a cheerful, “That’s it” from the other end of the line. When I inquired, Mary explained it to me. “That stands for Optical Character Recognition.” I began to understand, slowly. The direction given by the Smart Panel was surprisingly simple. What was really great was that it worked. I could do it. I felt like singing Handel’s famous “Hallelujah Chorus,” but that might have been a bit too much for Mary’s delicate eardrums.

My little trip down memory lane made me aware that most acronyms lead double lives. I remembered S.O.S. having something to do with a ship in distress. According to my brother-in-law, it had something to do with what the Army served on a shingle.

There are times when I wonder if the world has a fixation on excrement, any kind of excrement, chicken, bulls, etc. I suppose acronyms are easy prey to misconception. So is the often-naïve mind of the foreign-born. There is, of course, that famous OK, or is it o.k.? For the life of me, I simply cannot remember what that acronym stands for.

My daughter works for the State of Missouri. She tells me they have at least 300 acronyms and still counting. I’m certain that if the State can come up with at least 300 acronyms, Windows cannot be far behind. Maybe this is a good time to form a SIG dealing with ACRONYMS.