I'd say English Internet Slang, which is of course a quickly evolving thing, which you can't find in school books.

I was once thinking of writing a Nodelet Hack which is automatically parsing for uppercase words in a dictionary and adding a mouse over explanation to the DOM.

Like that one would only need to hover over an unknown abbreviation...

HTH! ;)

The word for those non-words is acronym, and there *are* way too many in use. The problem started because of the need to abbreviate while "texting". We now have a few generations, starting with millennials, who unironically use acronyms as words.

Obscure acronyms are used socially to define in-group preferences, and to obfuscate out-group understanding. This provides group defining opportunities to mock whoever doesn't know the lingo. A related problem is emerging with the use of self-censoring substitutions like "the B word" which can refer to multiple taboo words, or "the K word" you never heard before and don't know what is being substituted.

English is collapsing into a multitude of bizarre venaculars. The devolution can be seen in full with the emergence of hieroglyphic "icons" in software which mean something to the programmers, but leave the users struggling to learn a new dialect of symbolic illiteracy. The same sort of thing happened to Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire, to the point that no one alive really speaks the original language, but only several different incompatible dialects. It's all downhill from here. Enjoy the ride!

We have a page on the intranet at work, an 'acro buster'. A lot of the acronyms are either domain specific or exist within our organisation only. It works well, provided a) it remains updated. b) people know where to find it :P

> The same sort of thing happened to Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire, to the point that no one alive really speaks the original language, but only several different incompatible dialects.

That's a far fetched comparison. Contrary to Latin there was no "downfall" and there are still English speaking national institutions codifying a standard for school education. (tho I have to admit that phenomenons like Trump and BoJo do their best for a collapse)

> only several different incompatible dialects.

Those existed already in Roman times, almost all citizens were illiterate and spoke only a mix of vulgar Latin (Roman street slang) and old local languages. The lingua franca of the eastern empire was Greek. Later invaders added their languages to the mix (e.g. Germanic words like "bleu", "nord" or "boulevard" to French).

Furthermore are those "school standards" only relatively recent in wide-spread, during the first world war many military units had to be formed from the same region, for the soldiers to be able to communicate.

What's happening now is not a decline of the standard, but the visibility of many sociolects and dialects thanks to media and internet.

50-100 years almost only standards had a chance for mass distribution. Today you only need a smartphone to spread your lingo.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

In shorter works, like posts, people don't use acronyms properly on the internet.

If I wanted to tell you about the GNU C Compiler (gcc), first I would spell out the proper name and then use parentheses to show you how I plan to refer to gcc in the future.

There is also a difference between written and spoken English and short posts, like this one, encourage the use of casual spoken English rather than the more formal written English like you see in books.

In other words, I completely agree.