Acronyms Ad Nauseam

Daniel’s Acronym Fatigue Series started this train of thought, and everything came flashing back that I thought I would write it out. It all started, small, with a harmless ASAP, and then a cheeky FYI. Sometimes, I remember pausing in the middle of meetings and pondering, “Let’s double-click on the OKRs before we boil the ocean on this NPS dip,” and nodded along. Nobody disagrees with you in a meeting these days; they “push back to build alignment,” which is corporate for “no, and I will smile while saying it.” Somewhere a UX researcher is drowning a perfectly good sentence like “people don’t like this button” under a life vest made entirely of consonants: CTR, CSAT, NPS, and, if the deck is feeling ambitious, a lone, defiant ROI. The acronyms I can just about live with these days; they’re at least honest about being shortcuts. It’s the phrases & jargons that have quietly colonized my brain that worry me. “Let’s take this offline” is a sentence that has never once resulted in an…