Ffs, that TACO is hard to swallow for we acronym klutzes

So I got to see a doctor. I said to her: “I’m not feeling too good. Acronyms are giving me a bit of gip.”

“Like what?” she said.

I said: ‘Like uACR. When I heard that, it sounded like an accusation: “You ay see are”.

“No,” she said, “it’s your ‘urine albumin-creatinine ratio’.” ‘“Thanks very much,’” I said.

“Anything else?”

“No, that’s fine,” I said.

Outside I realised I hadn’t asked her what my uACR result was but at least I had heard something that dealt with the acronym.

When I got home, I thought some more about this and I quickly got to thinking that I’m an acronym klutz, or AK as we’re known. The true symptoms of an AK is not that you don’t know what an acronym is, but that you use it wrongly. On BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth, I translated GOAT for my listeners as “greatest of them all”. Classic AK behaviour. Eagle-eared readers quickly got it that “greatest of them all” would have been GOTA and GOAT must stand for something else. You may even know that it stands for “greatest of all time”. In which case you are not an AK.

For weeks I looked at MAGA and wondered why people were misspelling MEGA. About the same time, when DOGE kept appearing, I wondered why Venetian dukes were suddenly getting so much publicity. Like all readers, we AKs always read acronyms using the libraries of knowledge we have in our brains. It’s just that we use the wrong book.

Trump likes capital letters but rumour has it he doesn’t like TACO. TACO doesn’t refer to Mexican food but to “Trump Always Chickens Out” – a Wall Street traders’ sneer about how Trump allegedly doesn’t stick to tariffs he says he’s going to impose.

Best of luck with your acronyms. Some are quite hard to detect. We’ve been saying “radar” for so long, we don’t even know it’s what we’ve got. Even “nimby” has become so much of a word, its abbreviated origins have faded from view.

As an AK, I thought “fubar” was a fast food joint (‘“bar’”) of some kind, but that was the acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition”. Shortening “fuck” to “f” is perhaps the new euphemistic way to avoid saying the word as with “snafu” and “fafo”. Ffs do you not know that last one? Fyi, afaik, imo it’s “fuck about, find out”. Swalk, burma. Those last two will tell you how old I am, lmaorotf.