Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
Nicholas Thompson wrote:
The purpose of acronyms is -- present company exempted! -- to
solidify an ingroup by being unintelligible to outsiders.
If an `ingroup' can communicate concisely and accurately about things
in the world that individuals not in the group cannot, then that group
has achieved compression -- they are a community of experts. That's
if their shared knowledge and context is large and complex. If not,
then I agree that what has actually been achieved is encryption.
Yes, compression and encryption are "duals". They also both have a
relationship to entropy...
Also, acronym-speak are part of an emergent "pidgen" language and pidgen
languages are known to have interesting and valuable properties that
other "natural" languages do not. One property is a bit of
exclusiveness... individuals not part of the culture (usually emergent
at the interface between two or more cultures) where the pidgen language
emerges have a hard time getting in, but "anyone" can join (usually) by
investing time in hanging on the fringe of subcultures.
In the case of FRIAM, not everyone is here because they are specifically
"Complex Adaptive Systems" weenies.
Acronyms also often carry more semantics than the thing they contract.
FRIAM means more to most of us (especially those who never go for coffee
on Friday morning) than Friday Antes Meridian Coffee Group (FriAM)
does. Similarly few of us would ask someone "Can you give me the
Uniform Resource Locator for that website?" and nearly as few would have
a clue that they meant "URL".
Nick, you are correct however <grin> when you claim to have Really
Awesome Natural Talent (RANT).
- Steve
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