Being acrimonious about acronyms is a worthy goal. Presidents used to be known by abbreviations. Now there are calls for the new president’s term to be abbreviated by impeachment or the 25th Amendment. My suggestion as a longtime editor would be shorten by language.<\/p>\n
Now having worked\u00a0a year in academia, acronyms surround me. That I expected. What’s been surprising is the shock\u00a0of campus veterans that their abbreviations are not always\u00a0understood, even at times within the same classroom building. So I find ways to compel the spelling out of these confusing shortcuts. But like cliches, acronyms have their place<\/p>\n
One nostalgic spot where initials were great was in headlines about political leaders — FDR, HST, JFK, LBJ. They’re also smooth to say out loud, which is a key to my editing style. Eisenhower had the easy-to-speak “Ike” so never did we read DDE. In Arkansas, WR was the way the copy desk\u00a0wrote single-column-wide headlines for Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller in the late 1960s. Nixon fit in narrow columns, the “i” being one of the “l-i-f-t” half-count letters. RMN did\u00a0not glide on the tongue, and Nixon was only a 5-count<\/a>, Ford 4 1\/2.<\/p>\n