Acronyms and PHP

Whenever I teach discrete math and use FML to mean Formula the students laugh since its a common acroynm for  Fuck My Life. Now they laugh, and I say I know why you are laughing, I know what it means  and they laugh even harder.

BUT it got me thinking: Pigeonhole Principle! There are more things we want short acroynms for then there are short acroynms. Below are some I thought of. I am sure there are others, in fact I am sure there are websites of such, but I wanted to see which ones I just happen to know.

AMS- American Math Society and much much more:see here

DOA-

Dead on Arrival

Department of Aging. Scary!

ERA-

Earned Run Average in Baseball,

Equal Rights Amendment in politics

PCP-

Phencyclidine, a drug that you should never take.

Prob. Checkable Proofs. Obscure to the public but not to us.

ADDED LATER: A reader noted Post Correspondence Problem, a good example of a natural undecidable problem.

IRA- 

Irish Republic Army

Internal Retirement Account

Several companies have had rumors they fund terrorism because they were giving their employees IRA's. The headline `Company X funds IRA's' could be misunderstood.


SAT-

Standard Aptitute Test

Satisfiability (of Boolean Formulas) Obscure to the public but not to us. Actually it may get less obscure as more ``proofs'' resolving P vs NP come out.

SJW

Single Jewish Female (in classified ads- more on that later). I think SJF is more common.

Social Justice Warrior (sounds like a good thing but might not be)

Classified ads are a source of many acronyms which can be used to teach combinatorics.

{S,M,W,D,G}{B,C,H,J,W}{M,F}


S-single, M-married, W-widowed, D-Divorced, G-Gay (this one I've seen alone making me wonder
about S/M/W/D? I've also seen four-letter acronyms to disambiguate).

B- black, C-Christian, H-Hispanic,  J-Jewish, W-White.

M,F- Male, Female, though I am sure there are ways to say other genders.

Great for combinatorics! especially if you add in other ones (like BD)

WTF-

Wisconsin  Tourism Federation

You know what else it means so I won't say it (this is a G-rated blog). When I first saw it I thought `what the fuck?- how could they have screwed up so badly?'


TEACHING TOOL- when teaching PHP (Pigeon hole Principle, not the language PHP which stands for Hypertex PreProcessing, not quite in order, or Personal Home Page) you can use the the fact that

number of concepts GREATER THAN  number of 3-letter combos

leads to some 3-letter combos will be used more than once.