Name of the Game: OR Acronyms

My brother didn't find out what VCR meant until he was sixteen.

He only knew about "TTFN" because of Winnie the Pooh

FACE to him meant the thing that's on the front of your head.

And that big black brick that used to be how we watched movies? That was a movie, not a VHS.

Granted, he was brought up in the era sans VHSs, so this is hardly surprising. But he didn't know about VHS and DVD either--what they meant, I mean.

Neither did I.

Thanks to a nice little sitcom--Red Dwarf--I can proudly announce that the letters in DVD stand for Digital Versatile Discs. VCR means Video Cassette Recording and a VHS is a Video Home System. FACE is another way to remember the musical notes F, A, C, and E. Now y'all can sleep better, knowing that.

Why do I bring this up?

Because Acronyms are everywhere. Acronyms and mnemonic devices.

We use them for memorizing notes in music, in acting, in academic study(ie: Noisy Yolanda Nutty John Rode Into Connie Verm's New Hamster=New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire--the only states I can still remember in order, by the way).

An actor friend of mine memorizes his lines by writing them in acronym form. It's weird, but it works.

I work at two different libraries with two different classification systems. How do I remember the different call numbers? I use acronyms. Again, weird, but it works.

So the name of this game is acronyms. Where do you use them? How do you use them? I'll tell you, it's a lot more than you think.