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June 16, 2006
Acronymy domine
There is a geekish fondness, perhaps less popular these days than it once was, for devising silly acronyms. Famous examples are GNU (GNU's Not Unix) and Perl (by day Practical Extraction and Report Language, by night Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister). The best ones are conspicuously tenuous. There were once Emacs-like text editors called Eine (Eine Is Not Emacs) and Zwei (Zwei Was Eine Initially).
A member of my family works for a charity. It seems that UK charities have been developing symptoms of management theory. (A likely vector for infection is frequent interface with New Labour apparatchiks, leveraging synergies to facilitate win-win stakeholder scenarios.) Not being completely up on the lingo, she wanted to check with me what SMART means: maybe Specific, Measurable, Apt, Realistic and Time-bound. "Apt" doesn't have quite the right ring to it: not enough syllables, for one thing. I thought "Achievable" was more likely. Ah, but "Achievable" and "Realistic" are pretty much synonyms here. Well, yes, but they needed an "A", didn't they?
Posted by robin2 at June 16, 2006 12:14 AM