In my last post I had talked about “Community of Interest” and the vocabularies they create and share that seems cryptic to the people outside.
Today, I was poring through the many sheets of print that make up the Washington Post of the day and saw the personals section. I was struck by the cryptic acronyms that studded each plea for communion by some lonely soul with another. One of my hobbies is to look at vanity license plates on the cars around me and try to decode what they are saying or trying to say. The obvious and boring ones “MY BMW” or “MY BENZ”, I dismiss as uninteresting. Others are more challenging. It’s a game that is both entertaining when you get it and frustrating when you don’t.
I set to work trying to find the patterns amongst the coded acronyms in the personals.
BAF – Black Asian (or is it African?) Female
SWF – Single? Straight? White Female
SAF – Single? Straight? Asian? African? Female
SOH – I lost it on this one
S/DM – Single/Divorced Male
SWCM – Straight White Christian Male
DJF – Divorced Jewish Female
SWPF – Straight? Single? White Professional Female
W/WF – This was tricky, Widowed White Female
LTR – Another tricky one – Long Term Relationship
ISO – In Search Of
BCM – Now this became easy – Black Christian Male
PF – Professional Female
N/S – For a change of pace, Non-Smoker
GWM – Gay White Male
Clearly this was a community of interest made of people who spoke the jargon and knew exactly what acronyms to zero in on. And what to use to save some green. But to the rest of the world, this was mumbo jumbo.
I teach the DoDAF class at the FEAC Institute and am faced with the same challenges. From the Marines, I get cryptic acronyms like MAGTF (Marine Air-Ground Task Forces) and from the Air Force MAJCOM (Major Command) and ABCCC (Air-Borne Command and Control Center). But within each of these communities, members seem to know the secret handshake and the meaning of all those cryptic acronyms. Being accepted as a member means not asking what the acronym means!
A lesson for the enterprise architect: Much as we try to force people to expand all the acronyms and make things clear to the world at large, including ourselves - being able to influence people and events and becoming an “insider” means having to learn the lingo. If you are a Muslim Asian Male and responding to someone who is looking for a SWCM, Cupid is not likely to direct his arrows your way!
Today, I was poring through the many sheets of print that make up the Washington Post of the day and saw the personals section. I was struck by the cryptic acronyms that studded each plea for communion by some lonely soul with another. One of my hobbies is to look at vanity license plates on the cars around me and try to decode what they are saying or trying to say. The obvious and boring ones “MY BMW” or “MY BENZ”, I dismiss as uninteresting. Others are more challenging. It’s a game that is both entertaining when you get it and frustrating when you don’t.
I set to work trying to find the patterns amongst the coded acronyms in the personals.
BAF – Black Asian (or is it African?) Female
SWF – Single? Straight? White Female
SAF – Single? Straight? Asian? African? Female
SOH – I lost it on this one
S/DM – Single/Divorced Male
SWCM – Straight White Christian Male
DJF – Divorced Jewish Female
SWPF – Straight? Single? White Professional Female
W/WF – This was tricky, Widowed White Female
LTR – Another tricky one – Long Term Relationship
ISO – In Search Of
BCM – Now this became easy – Black Christian Male
PF – Professional Female
N/S – For a change of pace, Non-Smoker
GWM – Gay White Male
Clearly this was a community of interest made of people who spoke the jargon and knew exactly what acronyms to zero in on. And what to use to save some green. But to the rest of the world, this was mumbo jumbo.
I teach the DoDAF class at the FEAC Institute and am faced with the same challenges. From the Marines, I get cryptic acronyms like MAGTF (Marine Air-Ground Task Forces) and from the Air Force MAJCOM (Major Command) and ABCCC (Air-Borne Command and Control Center). But within each of these communities, members seem to know the secret handshake and the meaning of all those cryptic acronyms. Being accepted as a member means not asking what the acronym means!
A lesson for the enterprise architect: Much as we try to force people to expand all the acronyms and make things clear to the world at large, including ourselves - being able to influence people and events and becoming an “insider” means having to learn the lingo. If you are a Muslim Asian Male and responding to someone who is looking for a SWCM, Cupid is not likely to direct his arrows your way!
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