If you do, you probably served in the US armed forces, which uses acronyms more exhaustively than any other organizations on earth.
And you know that military acronyms, when spoken, are not spelled out one letter at a time, as civilians usually do, but they are pronounced as if they were actual words all their own. Which of course, they usually are.
Take for example the acronym for High Explosive Plastic Tracer, a type of 105mm cannon round once used to destroy enemy tanks. Its acronym is simply HEP-T, and is spoken as "hep-tee."
I personally am convinced that the services deliberately contrive pronounceable acronyms when naming military items and projects. This actually makes sense to do because vocabulary is used as second nature and whole names can be complex, a string of compound nouns and modifiers that no one could remember more than a dozen or so. But catchy word-acronyms are easy to remember and just fall into reflexive jargon.
There are some doozies, though. For example, there is the Advanced Short Range Air-Air Missile, or ASRAAM. Go on, pronounce that. Or the Navy's Bureau of Ships, BUSHIPS. (All they need now is a Bureau of Littoral Ships, for which you may construct your own acronym.)
When I was an artillery battery commander in Germany I wore green tabs on my epaulets that only combat-arms officers in command were authorized to wear. They were officially called, I kid you not, Combat Leader Identification Tabs (left). Don't believe me? Just Google it.
However, the most recent winner of "will they get this joke?" in the acronym department is the Navy in its upgrade program to the submarine-launched Mk 48 torpedo, long the mainstay of submarine weapons.
Upgrades to the guidance control section in includes the integration of a system called Common Broadband Advanced Sonar System, or CBASS – electronics to go into the nose of the weapon as part of the guidance section... .CBASS, pronounced Sea Bass. It just cracks me up.
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| The Mod 20 upgrade "stealth" module to the Mk 48 torpedo |
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