IUUI, IMCD, JURW
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
One thing that irks some people is running up against a language they don’t understand. If you are an English speaker, for example, you might be irked by public documents, such as ballots, printed in Spanish. If you are a Spanish speaker, English-only documents can put you off.
There is another language used in official documents that hardly anybody understands, and I think it is becoming more prevalent. You see more of it every time you run into official documents, or even semi-official documents. Yet, nobody has to use it. Some people call this language bureaucratese, some call it ibble-gibble. Whatever you call it, though, it consists of the Interminable Use of Unintelligible Initialisms. In bureaucratese, or ibble-gibble, that would be known as IUUI.
A good example of the Interminible Use of Unintelligible Initialisms was to be found last week in the agenda of the Madera County Transportation Commission. This agenda is the official notification of what the commission was to discuss at its meeting May 16.
Here is a sample of the initialisms, more or less in order of their occurrence, as they appeared on the agenda and supporting documents:
MCTC, FTIP, LTF, STA, SAFETEA-LU, SRTS, RTPA, VMT, COG, MCU, CAN, DAR, MAD, FED, CON, SACOG, CHIN, MOU, TIP, SSTAC, MAX, CATX, MCC, FAX, TAC, MCTA, DLAE, DLA, MPO, MUTCD.
I would suspect you don’t know what many, if any, of these initialisms means, just as you may not know what a word in Spanish means when you run across it. It’s very much a case of IMCD (Initialisms Making Communications Difficult). My advice: JURW (Just Use Real Words).
