Argh! I said it...

[dianec42]

I hate it when people say things like 'ATM Machine' and 'MLB Baseball' and like that. Hate it hate it hate it.

I just said 'RLE Encoding'. I am SUCH a bad person.

Comments

[tobyaw]

But it you just said ATM you could be meaning Asynchronous Transfer Mode or Automatic Teller Machine or Adobe Type Manager or Air Traffic Management or Anti-Tank Missile. Or one of a bunch of other common meanings. One has to qualify ATM to make it specific, for the benefit of the listener. Of course, the best thing to do would be to avoid three-letter acronyms entirely, and say 'cash machine' instead.

On the subject of RLE, the acronym has entered the programmer argot to the extent that it works as a word itself, not as an acronym. It is now the name of an encoding or file format, not just a description, in the same way that GIF or JPEG are.

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

It's also true that I was using the word "encoding" as a verb, whereas in the acronym it's more of a noun. Still, it makes me twitch, a bit like the Knights Who So Recently Said "Ni!" when they keep saying the word "it". (Oh no! I said it again! Aigh!)