DEEP IN COLORADO, MIKE MOLLOY, a retired member of the United States Air Force (USAF), has spent most of the past decade collecting acronyms – abbreviations formed by the initial letters of words in a name or phrase. In 1997, Mr Molloy had amassed 43,000; today his site (www.acronymfinder. com) boasts more than 560,000.

Purists make a distinction between proper acronyms (abbreviations pronounced as words, such as AIDS) and initialisms (abbreviations pronounced as individual letters: such as HIV) but most people lump them together, and we are in the grip of acronymania – swamped by CDs, DVDs, MP3s and TV, while consuming BLTs and QPCs (quarterpounders with cheese) from M&S and KFC.

E-mail and texting have seen a sub-language of space-saving initials evolve: BTW (by the way), FWIW (for what it’s worth), LOL (lots of love or laugh out loud). Indeed, there are so many acronyms whizzing around that it is harder and harder to distinguish between them, IYKWIM (if you know what I mean).

Tap “FAST” into the acronymfinder, and you will be offered 132 potential meanings. Even acronyms that seem deeply embedded in the language are being dug up and put to new uses. NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, but it has also been appropriated by the Nepal Association of Tour Operators, and the National Association of Theatre Owners. It may also signal Not Able to Organise, or Not Altogether Thought Out.

The acronym craze is recent, a product of the Second World War and the military love of acronym: NAAFI, AWOL, ANZAC etc. The word “acronym” did not appear in the OED until 1943. Some acronyms are useful (who would struggle through electrocardiogram when you have ECG?); but many are simply irritating, designed to exclude the uninitiated, and some are quite baffling. Why do we shorten world wide web to double-you double-you double-you, which has three times as many syllables? To make matters more complicated there are “backronyms”, an acronym formed from a word that already exists, such as SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder).

Often we impose an acronym on a free-standing word. Generations persisted in the belief that “posh” came from “Port Out Starboard Home”, supposedly the side of a ship on which the shaded, cooler and therefore smarter cabins were located on boats sailing to India and Hong Kong. Rich passengers with P&O, according to this theory, had POSH stamped on their tickets. The only problem is that it is probably wrong: P&O began sailing East in 1842, but the first recorded use of “posh” as in “smart” or “exclusive” was in 1918. Moreover, P&O did not issue return tickets, and its ships had a corridor between the cabins and the sides, so all would be equally shady.

The opposite of this is the “anacronym” (from anachronism), an acronym so completely absorbed into the language as a word in its own right that its origin has been generally forgotten – scuba, for example, from Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, or laser from Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Who now remembers that JCB was once the proud marketing acronym of the unsung Joseph Cyril Bamford, pioneer of earth-moving equipment?

Perhaps most annoying subset is what might be called a “hackronym”, formed by journalists desperate to spot a trend: YUPPIE (Young Urban Professional), or KIPPERS (Kids in Parental Property Eroding Retirement Savings).

Acronyms can cause more problems than they solve. When I was first working in the US, my friendly Irish-American banker asked if I wanted to open an IRA account. I was appalled at what I assumed was an invitation to bankroll terrorism, until he explained about the Independent Retirement Account.

US legislators are fond of contrived acronyms, the most excruciating being the 2001 Act Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terror: the USA PATRIOT Act. Pass the sic bag.

At the other end of the spectrum are those few brave organisations determined to carry on with a blithe disregard for the demands of simplicity. The founder of the Scottish Standing Committee for the Calculation of Residual Values of Fertilisers and Feeding Stuffs (SSC-CRVFFS) was not seeking a place in the OED.

But the most impossible acronym of all is to be found in the Concise [yes] Dictionary of Soviet Terminology, which cites “The Laboratory for Shuttering, Reinforcement, Concrete and Ferroconcrete Operations for Composite-Monolithic and Monolithic Constructions of the Department of the Technology of Building-assembly Operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organisation for Building Mechanisation and Technical Aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR.” Or N I I O M T P L A B O P A R M B E T Z H E L B E T R A B S B O M O N I M O N K O N O T D T E K H S T R O M O N T for short.

This is known as a heartattacronym.

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