What's in a name? Quite a bit when it's the most hated abbreviation of 2018 (GDPR, of course) Almost a year after the General Data Protection Regulation came into effect, the European Union's stricter privacy law has claimed another victim. But this time it isn't a US-owned website locking out EU users, a tech titan facing multimillion-euro fines or a major site running a stripped back version. Neither is it a dodgy …
Correct,it is an abbreviation created with Initialisms, such as FBI, CIA. Each letter is pronounced individually contrary to an acronym in which the individual letters create a "word".
Example of an acronym : WORM ( Write once read many).
BUT, there is always a BUT, what would "SCSI"be classed as.... an acronym or an abbreviation, many of us say "Scuzzy" or something similar, i.e. we pronounce it as a word which would make it an acronym even though the abbreviation does not form a word ?
One would normally pronounce SCSI as 'Scuzzy". An acronym is generally accepted as where there is a clear spelling of a word that matches the pronunciation, for example NATO, LASER, POSH. To make SCSI into an acceptable acronym you would need to rename it to something like SMACSI. Think BENELUX as an acronym for the Low Countries.
Yeah, we know the difference. Key thing is, abbreviation didn't fit nice in the headline space, which is the most important thing ever for us headline writers. The story is correct.
Now it's worked its way down the front page, where space isn't so limited, happy to switch it to the correct word.
Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot a problem.
C.
I worked for a INDeX PBX support company back in the 90's with a short snappy URL for their website.
Then the Digital Versatile Disc became a thing, and our website was getting hits from all over the place. As I recall the directors sold the company for a tidy fee, probably for the domain name
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