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What is your least favourite acronym? (lemmy.nz)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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Mine is OOO for Out Of Office. I always misread it in my head like a ghost and it takes me a few seconds to process. It also doesn't translate to speech—you have to say the whole thing.

Interested to see if others have similar acronyms they beef with.

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[–] 70 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

Don’t have a least favourite.

But my favourite is WYSIWYG has been mine for 20 years now, it’s so fun to say.

It stands for “What You See Is What You Get” and was used for visual editing programs where you could move things around and the final product would reflect that.

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  • [–] 48 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    For those who don't know, much of the reason WYSIWYG is so fun is because the accepted pronunciation is "whizzy-wig"!

    As a term it rarely gets used any longer, because "visual editors" are now the norm, where once they were the rarity.

    Before visual editors, you'd have content on a screen like a document which you could only see how it would actually look by physically printing it onto a piece of paper. This is because the printer itself knew about fonts and paper size and all that, and the editor didn't.

    Nowadays even with technically non-WYSIWYG editors like markdown text you can still instantly preview the rendered output on screen, so there isn't as much need to call it out as a feature.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    WYSIWYG is also pretty common these days for tabletop gaming, with regard for models using the rules for whatever weapons or equipment they are actually holding. This came around as often people build the model one way (e.g. with a machine gun) before a rule change, after which they want to use the better rules without re-doing the model (e.g. with a flamethrower).

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