On Wed, May 04, 2016 at 08:10:40AM +0100, Simon Hobson wrote:
> Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:
>
> > There's a special place in hell for people using ambiguous
> > abbreviations, acronyms, and nicknames.
>
> You mean, like the whole IT industry - and in fact pretty well any industry ? Such terms are routinely used because they make speech and writing less verbose. I did my apprenticeship in an engineering (plenty of acronyms there) firm that was also a supplier to the UK's navy - the defence field is a sea of acronyms* :-)
>
> But back to our world, "pen testing" is a common term. A few seconds with ${preferred_search_engine} would come up with a definition.

The trouble is with abbreviations that are common words in their own
right, with the result that people not knowing it's an abbreviation
will get a quite different meaning, and not know they've
misunderstood.

-- hendrik
.
>
> * I was involved in software, and one day for a bit of light amusement decided to fully expand the acronym of something I was working on. Thing is, some of the letters in the acronym were in fact initial of other acronyms, and by the time I'd fully expended all the levels I think a 6 letter acronym became a whole paragraph !
>
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