Page 2 of 3

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 15 Aug 2020 15:05
by clawgrip
There's always GTA, which bothered me at first when it was applied to Grand Theft Auto...because for me, it always meant Greater Toronto Area. "The GTA" still does, anyway.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 21 Aug 2020 14:46
by Pabappa
The two meanings of CGI confused me for a while during the period .... maybe mid 2000s ..... where one meaning began to gain ground at the expense of the other. CGI in the sense of old-fashioned "ugly but efficient" stands for Common Gateway Interface, though I never bothered to learn that at the time. The newer sense stands for computer-generated imagery. My confusion was that I believed that CGI scripts had evolved to the point where they could be used to generate complex animations, even though all of the CGI i had seen up to that point was just text spilled out onto a webpage with little advanced formatting.

The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard off Portsmouth, New Hampshire is sometimes called PNY presumably because of the sound of PNS. This was also a manufacturer of RAM, thumb drives, etc.... but there was no real potential for confusion. However I think most locals just call it "the Shipyard" and avoid the acronyms altogether. It took me a few years to realize that the beer brewery calling itself the Shipyard was instead located in Portland Maine and entirely unrelated. Both "shipyards" are large employers and the name has been used for related things .... e.g. a co-worker once said she ate at "the shipyard" and I never knew whether she meant a restaurant located near the Portsmouth naval yard or at one of the beer brewery's sit-in establishments.

CYA ("cover your ass") momentarily confused me as I just thought of "see ya" and didn't have a way to look it up at the time. I know I've made some other similar mistakes where I see an acronym and read it as a normal word that's just capitalized for emphasis, but can't think of any right now.

POS "Point of Sale" or "Piece of S--t" ... only in retail are you likely to encounter the first use, though. (edit: oh, right .... "part of speech".)
PS2 PS/2 (The computer or the connector) and PlayStation 2

BMP Bitmap ~ Basic Multilingual Plane

OED Oxford English Dictionary ~ Online Etymological Dictionary. This one may have been purposeful, and the latter OED accepts and uses the abbreviation EtymOnline in place of its acronym.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 21 Sep 2020 16:29
by Pabappa
bump, because it's been a month...


DHS Department of Homeland Security
DHS Department of (Health and) Human Services. The federal department is always and only DHHS, with four letters, but state level divisions of it can be called just DHS. The missing H seems to always be "health", so the DHS acronym stands for "Department of Human Services".

DOE can be similarly ambiguous, as the E can stand for Energy or Education in the US, and some nations also have a Department of the Environment.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 22 Sep 2020 11:09
by Khemehekis
Pabappa wrote: 21 Aug 2020 14:46=
POS "Point of Sale" or "Piece of S--t" ... only in retail are you likely to encounter the first use, though. (edit: oh, right .... "part of speech".)
You know, I was about to suggest POS, then I came here and saw you had already added it. Shoot!

I've got another one, though:

MSM MainStream Media
MSM Men who have Sex with Men
CYA ("cover your ass") momentarily confused me as I just thought of "see ya" and didn't have a way to look it up at the time. I know I've made some other similar mistakes where I see an acronym and read it as a normal word that's just capitalized for emphasis, but can't think of any right now.
Well, this one confuses me:

PMS PostMenstrual Syndrome
PMs Private Messages
PMs Prime Ministers

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 23 Sep 2020 11:41
by Khemehekis
Also:

GPS Global Positioning System
GPs General Practitioners

DHS is also short for D_____ High School. In fact, in my rock musical The Bittersweet Generation, the high school is called Dulcevida High (I picked the name out a few years before 9/11) and in one song, "The Problem with Youth", the assistant-principal Mr. Pittman actually sings: "Why did I become asst-principal at DHS?"

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 07 Oct 2020 03:44
by Khemehekis
Here's one that just hit me:

FSM Federated States of Micronesia
FSM Flying Spagjetti Monster

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 07 Oct 2020 19:38
by eldin raigmore
Khemehekis wrote: 07 Oct 2020 03:44 Here's one that just hit me:

FSM Federated States of Micronesia
FSM Flying Spaghetti Monster
Also
FSM Finite State Machine

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 10 Oct 2020 23:05
by Pabappa
RPG role playing game
RPG rocket propelled grenade

To get these legitimately confused would require a highly specific context, ... i've seen it in a meme post, but I suspect the person was only pretending to be confused becase they spelled out "role playing game" in their post, suggesting they knew what was originally meant. I cant find it now.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 10 Oct 2020 23:56
by Khemehekis
eldin raigmore wrote: 07 Oct 2020 19:38
Khemehekis wrote: 07 Oct 2020 03:44 Here's one that just hit me:

FSM Federated States of Micronesia
FSM Flying Spaghetti Monster
Also
FSM Finite State Machine
What's a finite state machine? Is it some kind of quantum technology?

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 11 Oct 2020 05:07
by eldin raigmore
Khemehekis wrote: 10 Oct 2020 23:56
eldin raigmore wrote: 07 Oct 2020 19:38
Also
FSM Finite State Machine
What's a finite state machine? Is it some kind of quantum technology?
It’s also known as a Finite-State Automaton.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 11 Oct 2020 15:31
by WeepingElf
Khemehekis wrote: 10 Oct 2020 23:56
eldin raigmore wrote: 07 Oct 2020 19:38
Khemehekis wrote: 07 Oct 2020 03:44 Here's one that just hit me:

FSM Federated States of Micronesia
FSM Flying Spaghetti Monster
Also
FSM Finite State Machine
What's a finite state machine? Is it some kind of quantum technology?
Nope. It is a theoretical model of a simple information-processing machine; Wikipedia is your friend and will explain.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 11 Oct 2020 16:45
by eldin raigmore
As long as it’s not about Aktionsart, which they have completely screwed up.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 12 Oct 2020 04:05
by Khemehekis
WeepingElf wrote: 11 Oct 2020 15:31
Khemehekis wrote: 10 Oct 2020 23:56
eldin raigmore wrote: 07 Oct 2020 19:38
Khemehekis wrote: 07 Oct 2020 03:44 Here's one that just hit me:

FSM Federated States of Micronesia
FSM Flying Spaghetti Monster
Also
FSM Finite State Machine
What's a finite state machine? Is it some kind of quantum technology?
Nope. It is a theoretical model of a simple information-processing machine; Wikipedia is your friend and will explain.
Wow. I actually looked up "finite-state automaton" on Wikipedia after reading eldin raigmore's answer.

I've read the stuff about automata and abstract machines and I still don't understand what this is all about.

Adding "FSM" to my Kankonian dictionary would require a massive investigation and hours of Wikipedia-reading that would likely surpass the time I spent reading about object-oriented programming while trying to understand the word "unbox".

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 16 Oct 2020 01:00
by aliensdrinktea
Khemehekis wrote: 22 Sep 2020 11:09 MSM MainStream Media
MSM Men who have Sex with Men
Similarly is MLM, "men loving men" or "multi-level marketing".

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 16 Oct 2020 18:04
by eldin raigmore
Pabappa wrote: 10 Oct 2020 23:05 RPG role playing game
RPG rocket propelled grenade

To get these legitimately confused would require a highly specific context, ... i've seen it in a meme post, but I suspect the person was only pretending to be confused becase they spelled out "role playing game" in their post, suggesting they knew what was originally meant. I cant find it now.
There’s also RPG Report Program Generator.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 17 Oct 2020 16:12
by Pabappa
We forgot BLM ....

BLM Black Lives Matter
BLM Bureau of Land Management

I remember someone being momentarily confused in 2016 when talking about the protests in Malheur Cty, Oregon. I remember thinking to myself "it finally happened" because I was waiting for someone to make that mistake. And it wasnt a contrived situation, since both are commonly abbreviated as BLM with no explanation.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 17 Oct 2020 18:28
by WeepingElf
eldin raigmore wrote: 16 Oct 2020 18:04
Pabappa wrote: 10 Oct 2020 23:05 RPG role playing game
RPG rocket propelled grenade

To get these legitimately confused would require a highly specific context, ... i've seen it in a meme post, but I suspect the person was only pretending to be confused becase they spelled out "role playing game" in their post, suggesting they knew what was originally meant. I cant find it now.
There’s also RPG Report Program Generator.
Yes, it once occurred in an Internet chat room that when I mentioned my (then) role-playing game hobby, using the abbreviation "RPG", someone asked me whether I was proficient in the Report Program Generator, or something like that; I don't remember precisely because it was more than 20 years ago.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 21 Oct 2020 22:40
by Pabappa
CSS Cascading Style Sheets
CSS Content Scramble System

Another one that few people would mix up, except in a highly specific context. Here it was me nearly twenty years ago, reading the words of people upset about some company's new copyright protection mechanism, but at a time when Internet Explorer was still winning the browser war and a big part of that was their apparent superior ability to handle new technology such as Cascading Style Sheets. I was impressed that people cared so much about the browser war that they wanted to get CSS working on all the lower-tier browsers .... this was on a computing forum where people often parodied both their own and each other's beliefs, so it didnt occur to me that they might have been talking about something else.

HUD Housing & Urban Development. Often pronounced "hood"
HUD Heads-Up Display. Used in video games and pronounced with the vowel of "hut".

Another one I learned a long time ago and forgot about is
DBZ Dragon Ball Z
DBZ Divide by Zero (perhaps not in common use, but I've seen it as an abbreviation for the name of a band)
dBZ decibels relative to Z, used in radar maps. Ive been getting back into weather lately and found that the term is still being used as an acronym.

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 05 Apr 2023 11:02
by Khemehekis
MtG Magic: The Gathering
MTG Marjorie Taylor Greene

Re: Funny three-initial mismatches

Posted: 05 Apr 2023 21:29
by eldin raigmore
Khemehekis wrote: 05 Apr 2023 11:02 MtG Magic: The Gathering
MTG Marjorie Taylor Greene
And lots of other things. (According to Google and the InterWeb!)
Meeting
Mortgage
Master Timing Generator
Military Tactical Generator
Media Test Group
Main Turbine Generator
….
All but two of those are hearsay if they come from me! I have personal experience only with meeting and mortgage!