Shorthands, industry jargon shaming

“You should have known what ABCD stands for!”

Have you been shamed before for not recognizing an industry shorthand at first hearing?

Shorthands like MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive), TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), PnL (profit and loss) are respectively important shorthands for their industries.

It is a good part of our communication, we shorten so we don’t have to spell out all the time the commonly known concepts.

What I don’t condone though, is when some enjoy playing gatekeepers.

There is nothing wrong with someone asking what ABCD means.

Especially when people are more and more adept at wide variety of expertise, some shorthands become overloaded and mean multiple things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computing_and_IT_abbreviations

Have fun reading it!

I love how LAMP stack would mean three entirely different programming languages.

How KB would be misconstrued for keyboard, knowledgebase and kilobyte. 100.23 KB. Would it be the article number in a filing system or the size of a file?

Then overlap an entire business industry’s own shorthands with the digital world’s ones. You will get misunderstandings.

Better to help people instead.

In writing, in every document I handle it as a single unit. The first time I use a shorthand, I spell it out. Depending on the situation, first saying Knowledge Base (KB) with the shorthand to follow, or the reverse.

Choosing the version based on how often a shorthand is used, how common it is.

Then I only use one understanding of the shorthand in the document, never the others. Yes, I take the time and energy to spell them out. On a short wiki page, it is not a big effort.

If you page or document is very long?

I would partition it up, structure it into a tree. Humans are not good at consuming large technical texts in one go. Avoid wall of texts. Take a bit of energy to structure your text around main messages.

Use dot-dash structure.

Break it up to paragraphs.

Add frequently titles.

But never ever shame someone if they are asking, what does ABC mean?