Acronyms and Names

bk marcus posts about government acronyms: http://www.bkmarcus.com/blog/2006/08/alphabet-soup.html

Acronyms are one way the government bewilders us and obscures its deeds from view. Bureaucrats tend to spew out whole sentences composed of incomprehensible acronyms. When I went to work for the State of Florida, I received a thick binder that defined all the acronyms, thousands of them, that I might encounter. It was months before I began to understand what the bureaucrats were talking about. “CYF and the GAL are working on the PPP right now, but CWLS will need to weigh in before it is finalized. This one’s a priority for OPA.”

Sometimes the acronyms were better than the full designation, especially where the agency name was misleading. For example, I worked for Child Welfare Legal Services (CWLS), but CWLS’s mission was only tangentially related to child welfare. We represented the state and the agents of the other acronymic bureaucracies, and it was their welfare that we advocated. If a child derived any benefit, it was purely accidental.

On the other hand the acronyms could be turned against the state. Health and Rehabilitative Services, known as HRS, was popularly called the “Home “Recking Society” because it contained the overreaching child welfare apparatus. Employees of the Division of Children, Youth and Families (CYF) referred to the division as CYA for “Cover Your Ass” because the organization notoriously revered procedure and paperwork over child welfare.

In the Army, acronyms abounded. We also had ridiculous names for everyday objects that lent them a sense of gravity. We didn’t carry spades; we had “entrenching tools”. We didn’t have toothpicks in our rations; we had “interdental stimulators”. We drove around in “M151 Quarter Ton Utility Vehicles”, not jeeps. We used “P38’s” to open the canned food in our rations, not can openers. I suppose that these objects look better on an inflated budget document than if they were called by their ordinary names. You might get away with charging the government $50 a pop for interdental stimulators, but not for toothpicks. I imagine the infamous $900 hammers purchased by the Pentagon some years ago weren’t called hammers; rather, they were know as “the M311-A/12 personal manual operated metal fastener intrusion devices with reverse extrusion feature” or some such thing.

To this day, I make a game of renaming ordinary objects in my office. On my desk right now, I have a “hand held metal document fastener reversal unit” that I use to remove the “metal document fasteners” applied by “metal document fastener application devices”. I need to remove these so that I can place the documents in the “multifunctional document imaging, reproduction and distribution system”.

The technique of renaming objects seems to have caught on the private sector. I saw an ad the other day for a “sleep system”. The company was selling mattresses, but the ad always used the term “sleep system”. I will not be surprised to find refrigerators referred to as “food preservation systems” and ranges as “cooking systems”. I’d pay way more for a system than a mere appliance. I know the government would.