I will never get over the British style of writing acronyms such as NASA, NATO, etc. as proper nouns

[conuly]

Nasa outlines plan for first woman on Moon by 2024

Also, here's a radical idea, maybe the team should be all-female. For equity's sake.

************

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Comments

[dewline]

I don't get that habit of the British press either.

Capitalise the acronyms, dammit.

[conuly]

So long as they're consistent, I guess I can't complain, but it really weirds me out every time.

[dewline]

And me.

[greghousesgf]

it took me a very long time to figure out that when a Brit calls someone "dark" they're referring to their hair and not their skin.

[marahmarie]

Oooh that's...an odd one. Hmmmm.

acronyms

[low_delta]

I'm one of those people who finds that form jarring. My brain wants to make a word out of those letters. I really get fixed on the spelling of words, and the meaning they create.

[marahmarie]

Yeah, they spell them out like words (capitalized first letter/lowercase) which drives me batty.

(I've tried to get over it! I've tried to search myself, asking myself: "What's so bad about it, really?" But I know the answer so I continue to go batty. Abbreviations and acronyms in standard English are the capitalized first letters of each word; generally speaking, so are initialisms. While I understand it's UK English, not over-here English, it just keeps looking/feeling wrong to me.)

[conuly]

I bet there are some Brits out there who have the exact opposite reaction, though.

[marahmarie]

Yeah, local idiosyncrasies being what they are, I suppose.

[moon_custafer]

(imagines someone online in the UK wondering “I understand they’re proud of it, but why do Americans have to *yell* Nasa’s name?”)

[marahmarie]

They do? I'm American and have no idea what you mean.

[moon_custafer]

Sorry, I was joking about the internet-communications rule that all-caps is the equivalent of yelling.

[marahmarie]

No apology needed, I guess I don't see much of Brits breaking into all-caps like USians do so totally missed the reference.

[antisoppist]

Yesterday I was slightly put out that my client's in-house editor (also British but has lived in Sweden for decades) had changed my "Isil" to "ISIL" throughout when I'd checked usage in the Guardian and by the BBC and I couldn't see why she would have done that.

So your post is timely, and yes, and I'm not going to change it back as it's a report for an international audience.

[nodrog]

But there's another element involved:  Pronunciation.  Nobody here actually says each letter, we say "nass-uh," but 'Nasa' is a word, a name, and it's pronounced with a long /a/, like nasal:  "Nay-sa."

(I first learned this from a long-ago science-fiction TV show where the character read aloud, 'Nay-sa Project Ganymede…')

[pauamma]

ISTR that a leaked NASA document mentioned they planned (for pragmatic reasons) to make the crewed Mars mission(s) all-women. I don't think it said anything about Moon missions, though.

[poliphilo]

I hadn't realized it was a British thing, but I see a lot of US media- so I'm happy with either.

[nodrog]

The Gerry Anderson TV series UFO was very Battle-of-Britain in its setup, and the silver-catsuited WAAFs guiding the interceptors always said 'You-foe'.  (And indeed WAAFs themselves were called "Waffes.")

[shewhostaples]

I don't like it myself, but we seem to be stuck with it.

My employer, meanwhile, insists on putting its name in all caps despite the fact that it doesn't stand for anything. (The BBC, of course, decapitalises all except the first letter.)

[negothick]

One of the women in the running is a graduate of Brown University, where I did my doctoral work. There's a great profile of Jessica Meir in the recent Alumni Magazine, and I'm on Team Jessica. Not only is she a fellow alum, but she's a middle-aged Jewish woman with lots of curly hair (like me, only younger!). She was on the ISS when the pandemic began, and (as the article said), she was among the only humans who were not at risk--until she returned to Earth, of course.

[nodrog]

That notion, that she was among the only humans outside the problem, reminded me of a Trivial Pursuit factoid:  At the 1939 World's Fair a Time Capsule was extremely buried, containing physical samples of life in AD 1939, including grains of wheat, kernals of corn, apple seeds, maple seeds, &c.

Those now stand as the only extant plant seeds that have never been exposed to atomic radiation, for good or ill.

[nodrog]

> maybe the team should be
> all-female. For equity's sake.

It's been done.  One of the crews in the US Navy Sealab back in the 1960s was all-female.  It's the only practical way to work it.

Re: Japan

[nodrog]

> some mixed-race people say they feel
> like foreigners in their own country.

Not just Eurasians - that extremely xenophobic society discriminates against even pure-lineage Japanese if they were not born in the Home Islands!  Any number of Nisei in the US had kept themselves eugenically pure for generations - and it didn’t matter at all.  This made the WWII internment all the more bitter, as they then learned what their adopted homeland also thought of them!  (This is why Nisei troops in the US Army were bad news to whites and Japs alike - they had something to prove to both sides, and they did, in grim blood.)

The only Western equivalent to this was Hellenic Greece, where you had to be born within the walls of a given city to ever be a citizen of it, even if both your parents were!  Sorry, Charlie…

Update to add:  Not just Eurasians - Japan has long sought to deport all Koreans regardless, but regard they must, because these folks were born and raised right there in Japan, and you can’t “deport” someone to somewhere they’ve never been…

[spikethemuffin]

>Also, here's a radical idea, maybe the team should be all-female. For equity's sake.

WORD.

[negothick]

AFter all, they're calling it "Artemis," and men don't usually fare very well around Artemis.