Ladies and gentlemen, behold the United States of America.

Now shorten it to an acronym, and we get "U.S.A.". Now, get lazy, as we all do, and remove the periods, and we have USA. And IBM. And MCI. And CIA, or the KGB, NKVD, or whatever... you know, from the USSR (or CCCP, in Russian).

Notice how the capitalization denotes that the word is an acronym? A good, sensible, sane practice. Its really hard to blog about "International A.N.S.W.E.R." if you have to keep putting all those danged periods in. That's probably intentional, just to keep people from saying bad things about them. ;-) And it makes them look like a refugee from a late 60s spy movie... you just know they're in league with KAOS, SMERSH or SPECTRE... the bad guy organizations always had longish, badly-contrived acronyms.

Which brings me to my thesis statement:

"WEB" is not a bloody acronym!!!

Okay, whew, that felt better. And while I'm ranting, let me also suggest that NET is not either, nor is EMAIL, nor CHAT.

This catharsis was brought on by a man at work, a man-ager at work, even, who insists on referring to CHAT in the upper case. I do Lotus Sametime development in Java for a major St. Louis based company. Sametime is instant messaging and chat software. And, like WEB, CHAT is not an acroynym. We are not required to write random technology-related nouns in all caps, it does not make the world a significantly better place to dwell. ;-)

Here at Random Observations (RO), We Expect Better.

Any other pseudo-acronyms?

Update: SPAM is not an acronym either.