Two Blondes Walking® are forever posting nice things about the essential, sometimes quirky kit that Scott and I sell thru Shavenraspberry, even though we have no financial links whatsoever. What we all do share is a passion for people to be safe in enjoying the great outdoors and this has prompted me to address something I’ve been meaning to for ages.
Nowadays, I only train members of our armed forces in specialist navigation and Scott Search & Rescue teams in SAR navigation. Yet we receive lots of requests from members of the public who want training in navigation, so today we’re creating a resource webpage on our website to address exactly this need. W
e are going to recommend people we have navigated with, trust and respect and who are both incredibly professional as well as personable; truly believing in the value training they deliver. First cab off the rank is Two Blondes Walking® If we were sending our kids on a nav course, Lucy and Fi would be our first port of call.
We’ll have this new webpage up and running within the next month (time of writing May 18, 2022)
Anyway, back to their amusing blog about acronyms…
Acronyms can associate you with a particular social group, profession, or organisation. Bureaucrats often devise and then use them to sound officious or exclude people who aren’t in the know. I remember working for the first time with troopers from a regiment, whose function was very specialised, and them getting as tired of me continually asking what each acronym meant, as I did of asking. At the end of Day 1 I came up with a cunning plan. The MOD, in keeping with all government institutions, keep records of everything, including acronyms. The NHS has one, HMRC and of course the MOD. So, I logged onto the governments publishing service and downloaded the one I needed, only to discover there are more than 18,500 listed. If you don’t believe me just Google ‘acronyms_and_abbreviations_dec08.pdf’ – reading it is better than counting sheep!
According to lexicographer and dictionary expert Susie Dent, “the average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is around 20,000 words”, so for me to come familiar with all those used within the MOD I would need to almost double my vocabulary!
Over the time I was working with this unit I became familiar and comfortable using their acronyms. This was because they were an intrinsic component of my daily work, something to do with remembering things in active memory rather than ambient memory, in the same way we can as quickly forget the factoid we Google on the moment.
And yet today I don’t think I can recall any of these acronyms. Therefore Q-cards, reference cards and the like can be so important, especially in life critical situations as I can personally attest, under duress they can be even harder to recall.
In an attempt to stop me being so bloody serious, a complaint my entire family levy at me, here are some of the wackier acronyms I’ve learned about in writing this blog.
IKEA: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd – rolls off the tongue doesn’t it!
Haribo: Hans Riegel Bonn – bet the kids will love this when they’re chewing their sweeties!
TASER: Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle – consoling when you’re lying on the ground shaking having just wet yourself.
WD-40: Water Displacement, 40th Attempt – I love the candour in their admission of 39 defeats.
Oh, and peculiarly, SOS doesn’t mean save our souls. It means nothing. It was chosen because the morse code is so easy to remember: DOT DOT DOT, DASH DASH DASH, DOT DOT DOT
