it’s a nice touch that the name for the syndrome also fits the syndrome.
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Government.
Every gov contract has pages upon pages of acronyms and their definitions up front just so one can understand what the F is inside. Even then.
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An old programming fact: The acronym PHP actually stands for Hypertext Pre-Processor.
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The irony of “RAS syndrome” is not lost on us.
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My mum used to live i n Tow Law in co. durham, which is only Hill hill. However, it’s quite the ways up in the air, with… interesting weather. First time I drove there, I saw a car upside down in a tree. The locals like to think they’re used to the weather conditions, but I’m not so sure.
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GNU’s Not Unix
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And F would be the acronym for?
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This might be more of an FAQ question, but have I ever written here on the BBS system about the time I was part of a CSI investigation with the DNC committee? It turns out that the person they thought arrived DOA was just late because of the change to CST time. But while the PR relations coordinator with ADHD disorder was compulsively checking the ETA of arrival, the non-dead guy was chilling, watching the ESPN network. Anyway if someone could boil this down to a quick meme (preferably in GIF format) that’d be great
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Reading this made the LED diode in my brain flicker.
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This whole comment thread is quickly getting FUBAR’d beyond all repair.
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Just your normal fucked-up SNAFU.
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Did you fubar FUBAR, cause I don’t recognize “repair”?
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I always thought the r stood for recognition…
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As a Canadian, SIN number has always amused me 
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Also though, if you feel the need to go on a rant at a customer service worker about how PIN number is redundant because N stands for number please just don’t. Another middle aged white dude already did it a month ago, I can assure you.
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There are multiple versions of the acronym and “repair” is one of the main ones, but “recognition” and “recovery” are also common.
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Is it true that “The La Brea Tar Pits” means “The The Tar Tar Pits”?
Oh, that’s been covered!
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The misunderstanding comes from not realizing that identical strings of characters can be different language tokens based on context. It also stems from the formal English notion of following up a noun with a classification when speaking more formally.
“Sahara” does indeed mean desert in several languages. But English is not one of them. In English, Sahara is a proper place name. Hence in English, Sahara Desert.
“Chai” means tea in many languages. But in English, it refers to a specific kind of tea- the kind that is popular in many of the places that speak the languages where “chai” means tea. So in English, Chai tea makes sense. Most readers will know that Chai is a kind of tea; but saying Chai tea helps readers understand what Chai is if they don’t know what it is; they know it is a tea.
Again, Los Angeles is, in English, a proper place name. If I were talking about a painting of angels in my local church, I would refer to them as the angels. If I were speaking in Spanish, I might say “La pintura del los angeles en mi iglesia”; and the meaning would be fairly clear (the muddled meaning would be from my limited Spanish skills). But if I said “The painting of Los Angeles in my church”, English speaking people would expect to see a painting of the city; and Spanish speakers who didn’t speak English wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about other than it had Angels in the middle. (And even then, they would likely assume I meant the city, since I was speaking English.)
This is even true of the acronyms that have become formal nouns in their own right.
Informally, using the noun without explanation would be right. “I’m going to hit the ATM.”
Formally, one would still use the noun/class structure. An ATM is a machine. A PIN is a number. So I would write “When using the ATM Machine, you must enter your PIN Number to access your accounts.”
If I were writing this 30 years ago, before ATM and PIN became nouns, the formal way of writing this would have been “When using the ATM (Automatic Teller Machine), you must enter your PIN (Personal Identification Number) to access your accounts.”
Obviously, there is some overlap between these uses; it is a call as to when an acronym becomes a noun. But you really shouldn’t mix uses in the same document; if you use it for the first time as an acronym (ie., you write “ATM (Automatic Teller Machine)”) then you should stick with ATM without the following “Machine” for the rest of the document. But if people are calling it the ATM Machine or PIN Number, it’s a good sign that ATM is now a noun, and not a acronym. 
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