An acronym is a word composed of abbreviations of other words. In the "old days", people used to include all the periods, such as in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." or "U.S.A.". But this convention was a bit hard to type, so it's understandable that people also sometimes omitted the periods: "AFL-CIO", for example, retaining the capitalization -- which itself comes from the rule that you capitalize titles.

I noticed a few years ago that the British press* stopped understanding that certain words were acronyms. For example "AIDS":

The BBC, in conjunction with Medecins Sans Frontieres, has been following the lives of seven people from the community of St Rodrigue, in Lesotho, as they struggle to live with and work through the country's HIV/Aids crisis...

Bizarrely, they still understand that "HIV" is an acronym (they didn't write "Hiv/Aids"), but they seem to think that the "Aids" is the name of the disease -- as though it were named for the fact it aided its victims (which it certainly doesn't), rather than being short for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

So I was rather dismayed to note the same thing happening with ACORN, even in places like the WSJ and New York Times: "Acorn Charged in Voter Registration Fraud Case in Nevada." If that were true, we should start keeping an eye on oak trees! (And I would curious to know how just one of their seeds made it all the way to Nevada and caused so many problems! Who would have guessed that oak trees could be such a serious threat to our national elections?)

This is certainly not on the same scale as the tragedy in Darfur, or our skyrocketing national debt. But it is another signpost on the way down. Read old personal letters and books, and note that even the bad writers are clearer and more lucid that most professional writers working today. This is yet another step in that direction: the loss of recognition of acronyms among even the "literate" classes.

(* Americans seem to regard anyone with a British accent as better educated or more intelligent. This may have been a sensible reaction at one time, but watching carefully, I'd have to say that their "educated" citizens are actually worse than ours in a number of ways, and lead us in down-sloping intellectual and social trends. For example, I remember listening to a BBC radio report about women who were being "pressurized" into arranged marriages. NPR would never let that past.)