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.
Norway has a weird obsession with making translated acronyms for well established terms. Lately, after many years of use of “AI”, the Language Council decided that the term should be changed to “KI”, as that is the “correct” Norwegian acronym. Not only does it feel wrong to say, but it invades another local acronym for me.
To top it of, that council decided to make “KI-generated” the “word of the year”, which seems like a pat on their own shoulder to brilliantly making the acronym.
I hate it.
A Kamehameha is also KI-generated.
Killer Instinct-generated.
Similarly, GDPR is referred to as DSGVO in Germany, based on the German name of the legislation. Same legislation, just a different name in one country because they didn’t want to use an English acronym.
We have the same with EEA (european economic area, that part of EU which norway is a part of). It’s EØS here. It makes it convoluted to discuss, especially since EEA is mainly brought up in international subjects. And the actual words behind the acronym is never brought up, so the acronym serves mainly as a name, making the differentiation even more useless.
I take it the Language Council serves a similar role to the Spanish or French Academy of Language, and that it takes a prescriptive attitude, correct?
im glad that english prescriptivism is mainly just a social thing tbh
word of the year lol smh
In Czech we had/have this too. I haven’t heard it in years now so maybe it’s finally gone, but when Morpheus tells Neo about the first “UI” (umělá inteligence = artificial intelligence).
did it catch on with the public, or do they still say AI?
It’s a bit of a mix. I think people generally say AI, but every source which aims at using Norwegian in a formally correct way are starting to adopt KI. Many radio hosts seem frustrated, as they are suddenly required by the producer to switch up an acronym they have been using for several years.