BEWARE OF ACRONYMS

摘要

During one of the authors' first weeks working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LAND, she encountered another potential problem area of language: acronyms. "In a meeting of LANL statisticians, a fast-paced conversation was taking place about experimentation within the lab. A typical statement went something like: 'Doe in the DOE has really evolved.' Needless to say, I was quite lost. "Well, the use of doe (design of experiments) and DOE (Department of Energy) in different parts of the sentence made perfect sense when fully up to speed. For the uninitiated, however, the abbreviations were identical, and knowing only the first interpretation meant that the conversation made no sense."