Cringe Acronyms

Not so much acronyms, but several popularly misused terms that drive me nuts:

* "physically", e.g. "I physically deleted the files", when in fact the meaning is more like "actually", "manually", or "using one fewer layers of abstraction", since physical deletion would presumably involve a hammer or shredder or something along those lines.

* "special characters", e.g. "the application breaks when users input special characters in the username field". Often people use this term to refer to anything other than a-z0-9, including things as mundane as spaces or punctuation. To my mind, any character that exists in 7-bit ASCII or has a dedicated key on the keyboard just isn't that special!

Neither infra nor algo are “acronyms”.

Webster’s defines an acronym as “a word (such as NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term”.

It’s a huge pet peeve, as someone between roles, when folks are imprecise in their terminology, especially if it’s a role that will involve writing code rather than say, being a penetration tester…

(Things like… that… require *lateral thinking*, not precision.)

I accept FANG or FAANG to represent "big tech businesses", for me it's not really about which companies are included or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech#FAANG Lately, also in HN comments, people started using GAMAM, MAMAA and such.

i10n, i18n, but I've also seen k8s for Kubernetes

Those are abbreviations not acronyms and neither are particularly egregious… they’re literally just shortened versions of the words “infrastructure” and “algorithms”.

Not an acronym, but whenever I hear the word "innovation" now, my reaction is basically the same as Jules in Pulp Fiction when the one guy won't stop saying "What?" (*).

(*) i.e. "say that one more time and I am not responsible for my reaction". Samuel L. Jackson put it a little differently though.

crypto-anything

i-almost anything - usually mindless marketing.

A few years ago I started working on a project (that I never finished) that I tentatively named the Command Line Interface Tutorial. Thankfully I never finished the CLIT.

ESG

f.u.b.a.r. is the most literally cringe acronym for me.