Somewhat recently I showed how acronyms scarcely existed prior to the 18th or 19th centuries, and that their rise is tied to a shift toward a more autistic or Aspbergery mindset. The examples were from hard and well as soft science. Still, finding them in geeky areas of academia isn't too surprising. But what about where you'd least expect them? That shows just how autistic people become as they genetically and culturally adapt to modern life.
Within English and folklore studies, there's the viral acronym FOAF -- "friend of a friend" tale, meaning who the supposed source of some urban legend is. These people are arts and humanities types, not the ones who are supposed to be dorks.
Then there are the even fluffier fields like queer studies, women's studies, etc. There and within related activist groups, there's some permutation of the widely used acronym LGBTQ (that was the form I remember among the "theory" people and activists at Brown), standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender(ed?), Queer. "Gay and lesbian" or "homosexual" or whatever just won't do -- an acronym must be coined!
Weird sexual preferences even among straight guys are also littered with acronyms, which you can look up on your own: BDSM, CBT, CFNM, and the most mellifluous YKIOK,IJNMK. Not being a porn hound, each time I tune in there are at least one or two new genres with cryptic acronyms as names since that last time. You can bet that these genres have a nerdier-than-average fan base. This isn't an academic field at all -- just porn. Earlier I mentioned the alphabet soup of terms found among PUAs.
Video games also show lots of acronyms, even though they aren't inherently geeky -- they're just toys or games. But the ones that appeal most to the Aspbergery mind are full of them -- RPG, MMORPG, LARP (not a video game, but related), and terms like MP, HP, XP, NPC, etc., not to mention the names of their favorite games. Hardly anyone refers to SMB (although that term does exist; just not popular) for the Super Mario Bros. games, or DD for games in the Double Dragon series, and so on. Yet just about every role-playing game is referred to by fans in acronym form: FF, BoF, CT, SoM, etc. And while role-playing game terms are only referred to by acronyms (XP, NPC, etc.), no one does this for platforming games like Mario Bros. -- "one-hit death" is not called 1HD or OHD, "mini-bosses" are not called MBs, and so on.
Every group wants to make shibboleths to distinguish in-group from out-group members. But in a pre-modern world, people were creative enough to coin whole new words ("transubstantiation") or evocative phrases ("Sturm und Drang"). With the shift toward autism and lower creativity, no effort is made to endow today's jargon with any charm -- just begin with the most straightforward and anodyne description of something, then turn it into an acronym (like "U.F.O." or "IS/LM"). And as the above examples show, it's not just the inherently geeky areas of life that are being colonized by acronyms -- games played for fun, sexuality, and the arts and humanities are also under attack. This has less to do with the essential qualities of the domain in question and more to do with the people whose desires are reflected therein.
"Asperger's"
ReplyDeleteThe typical porn user is probably a male, who is obsessive about collecting porn, fussy about his exact preferences, stimulated by 2D images, visual, has low empathy for other people including women, and has the effects of high testosterone in at least some areas of his brain. That is, autistic and obsessive types; and those are the types who are also likely to want to use pseudoscientific categorisations such as CFNM.
ReplyDeleteSome of the nerdier PUA blogs are replete with charts and scores and elaborate flow charts.
It is all part of the autistic masculine desire to capture moonbeams in a jar; label them with some Latinate term; and claim thereby to understand the nature of human reality. Swift mocked such types in Gulliver's Travels ("The Academy of Lagado").
I remember one weirdo on the Internet who used to like to have sex with a black male lifesized plastic dummy while his wife was fucked by another man. He said that he suffered from "agalmatophilia" (sexual attraction to statues). The truth was he was just a weirdo. A weirdo with a good vocabulary.
Fighting games tend to feature increasingly ascending levels of acronyms as skill levels rise - in competition and likewise for any competitive videogame. Perhaps a general function of technical skill linking with Asperger's-y traits.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if military acronyms are comparable to the above or merely a product of association between technical ability and acronyms. Music would be an interesting comparison, whether acronyms accelerate with technical aptitude or focus (acronymization of genre names like RnB doesn't appear to show an association with Asperger's-y traits, but perhaps there's a deeper story there).
i've never heard of some of the acronyms you mention except ff. only ff and som show up on the first page of google. fps, rts, and fighting games use plenty of acronyms but may be less asperger'sy than rpgs.
ReplyDeleteFPS
CoD
Q3A
TF2
HL2
RTS
SC2
AoE3
SSF4
MvC3
TvC
maybe competition is what drives acronyms here. i'm sure you don't consider ncaa, nfl, nba, f1, nascar etc to be asperger'sy. or do you?
Hmm, what do you call the guy who surfs the web to watch the weirdo on the Internet who used to like to have sex with a black male lifesized plastic dummy while his wife was fucked by another man. He said that he suffered from "agalmatophilia" (sexual attraction to statues). The truth was he was just a weirdo. A weirdo with a good vocabulary?
ReplyDeleteThe typical porn user is probably a male, who is obsessive about collecting porn, fussy about his exact preferences
ReplyDeleteI'm certainly fussy about my exact preference.
And you all know what that preference is.
Peter
rcltfy
ReplyDeleteGood point.
FYI
ReplyDeleteLGBTQ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgendered and Questioning.
Even though gay culture has somewhat reclaimed the word queer, it still has a generally negative connotation. It's kind of like how some black guys use the n-word allot, but most white people just can't use it. Gays refer to themselves as queer, but in the same fashion as the above example, it's still considered derogatory (for a str8 person) to call someone queer.
Great blog. This was the first page that came up when I searched for porn acronyms. :-)