Thread:Superluigi6/@comment-26501321-20150727055218

Hello Luigi. I know this is a tiny thing and no one is really affected by it but I'm constantly bugged when the "aconym rule" is mentioned (no swearing thing). It's not the rule itself that bugs me, it's the title of the rule. Whoever wrote the rules on the chatroom policies page did not know the difference between an acronym and abbreviation. So I want to clarify, and hopefully you can change it.

What the rule should really be is to prohibit swearing abbreviations. You already know what it is, a string of letters in which every letter represents a word, which the words come together to form a sentence or whatever. The usual chat stuff, like WTH, among others with swear words in them, are abbreviations.

Acronyms are different. An acronym is a word in which every letter represents a word. The difference betweem an abbreviation and an acronym is that the former is just a bunch of letters, while the latter is a pronouncable word. "Laser" is an acronym, since it is a word we often use and it represents " L ight  A mplification through  S timulated  E missions of  R adiation." "Scuba" is another one, which means " S elf  C ontained  U nderwater  B reathing  A pparatus," and we can pronounce the word, hence it is an acronym.

What I want to propose is that we change the chatroom policies page and replace instances of acronym with abbreviation for grammatical correctness. I can't do it because then the mods will most likely get up all over me for unnecessary rule changes. I know this looks insignificant, but I just want the rule page to be perfect. We could go the extra step and have the mods learn the difference themselves, because they make the same mistake too ;)

Thanks for reading. 