An
article by the
Boston Globe's Linda Matchan appeared yesterday on the topic of
simplicity. The typographic covering the top half of the paper was extremely bold and unexpected for the usual clutter of a newspaper. In the article, I'm quoted as referring to "GSM" versus "CDM" (the latter is "CDMA" of course) but when I saw this misprint I wondered about the science of acronyms. It turns out that
acronyms are quite the hobby on the Internet.
Today I wrote some program codes to figure out the distribution of 3-letter like GSM versus 4-letter acronyms like CDMA and so forth. I admit I'm a bit rusty as I haven't programmed in maybe a year since my Paris exhibition in
November. The results of my study are as follows:
|
No. Letters
|
Relative Level of Occurence
|
| 2 |
|
| 3 |
|
| 4 |
|
| 5 |
|
| 6 |
|
| 7 |
|
| 8 |
|
| 9 |
|
What can we conclude from these findings? Well, 3-letter acronyms are much more popular than any other kind of acronym. But 4-letter acronyms aren't that shabby as well.
A good acronym, or otherwise abbreviation, can make a little seem like a lot lot more. For instance, I attribute the success of the Motorola
PEBL to its combination of elegant styling but also a particularly excellent abbreviation in name. A "pebble" -- so
simple an object. law1(); ?>, concentrate, purify, simplify. CUL8R.
John Maeda
