off by one for 2013 March 28 (entry 0)

Thu Mar 28 06:13:58 PST PFNA -- Proposal For New Acronym:

We already have TLA, for Three Letter Acronym, but I've been thinking for a while that the TLA namespace is almost exhausted, which could result in the catastrophic failure of efficient communication. Either that, or everyone is going to have to start using NAT to allow multiple expressions to hide behind one TLA (... but that's a topic for a separate post.) Anyway, having just encountered the acronym SPOF -- Single Point Of Failure -- I propose the acronym AOFL: Acronym Of Four Letters. You can either speak it as "A-O-F-L" or, as I prefer, as "awful."

Acronym creators should transition to the new AOFL protocol as soon as possible.

Update: I'm reminded by Nick Moffitt about ETLA -- Extended Three Letter Acronym. There's also a list there of other four letter acronym acronyms, and even my favorite, which describes the class of acronyms including things like LASER and SCUBA: VLFLA -- Very Long Five Letter Acronym. So I guess that AOFL will just be a forgotten standard -- the Betamax to ETLA's VHS.

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