You have never heard of that acronym before, have you? Neither had I, until I just made it up.
It stands for Acronyms are the Bane of Every Reporter and Editor.
Many of you reading this have probably experienced my questioning. What does XYZABC stand for? Although I admit, I haven't heard that one yet.
Keep it simple when you are presenting in a public meeting. Not everyone listening to you at the meeting or online will understand those acronyms that you bandy about among your colleagues every day. As soon as the acronym pops out of your mouth, please tell us what it stands for.
Be courteous and helpful to all reporters and when you say something such as NMAA, be aware that most people seeing it on an agenda or hearing it from your mouth will NOT know that it stands for New Mexico Acequia Association.
You financial folks who simply love your acronyms often say EBIDA, as if everyone in the world knows what that stands for. Nope, it took me months of looking it up online each time to learn that it stands for earnings before interest, depreciation and amortization.
Then it gets really confusing when a group of letters means different things at different meetings. For instance, PER can mean preliminary engineering report, but then someone says PERA, which means (and I have to look this one up just about every time, including as I write this.) Public Employees Retirement Association.
All of you working in governments, local, state and federal, you're your mental glossary of the acronyms you use.
But we reporters and editors see acronyms from governmental entities, medical services, educational organizations, and everyone else.
Have pity on us. We're trying our best to get news to you as accurately, factually and quickly as possible. Making us try to figure out what, to us, is an inscrutable mess of alphabetical symbols takes time.
That's one of my excuses for not always getting articles out in a timely manner, and I'm sticking with it.