Invasion of the Acronyms

I've had it with TLA. Before you try to start guessing what TLA stand for, Tender Loving Aardvarks, Total Lemonade Anxiety, I thought I'd tell you. TLA stands for Three Letter Acronyms.

I've had it with Three Letter Acronyms. Come to think of it, I'm rather tired of the four, five and six letter varieties as well. Do they honestly serve a purpose?

The purpose of your basic acronym is simple: it makes your life easier. But acronyms are like pigeons. One or two are cute, but when thousands start showing up, you've got an Alfred Hitchcock movie on your hands.

Who keeps planting acronyms into our vocabulary? Who forces us to remember the what CVS, CBS, DVD and HDTV stand for? It took me a while, but I finally reasoned out the answer.

Google.

That's right. The same guys who do the search engine, the online maps, who own the hottest stock in the business. That mega-million dollar company that everyone loves to talk about. Really. It's all their fault.

First of all, we know they CAN do it. Google is so powerful it had actually been able to place new words in our vocabulary. After all, didn't Google somehow find a way to fit the word "Google" into our vocabulary? I know I use it all the time.

-"Hey, who sings that song about Pina Coladas?"

-"I don't know, why don't you Google it?"

OK, you're thinking, maybe Google CAN do it, but why would they want to? What possible reason could they have for inundating us with acronyms?

The fact is that Google would love nothing more than to have people speaking solely in acronyms. Why? Because no one can remember them all.

Can you? I can't even remember old acronyms. Do you know what NBC stands for? How about VCR? Or TNT or VHS?

Try this. Pick three letters. Any three letters. Now Google them. I guarantee, no matter what letters you picked, they stand for something. And the winner, of course, is Google, who gets money every time you search for something, even if its 11 PM and out of shear boredom you search for "medieval donkey warriors."

So how do we fight this invasion of the acronyms? I, of course, have a plan. It's a bit drastic, I'll admit, but I think I've just shown what a dangerous time we're in.

I call for a return to hieroglyphics. That's right, it's time to write like an Egyptian. It's time we recognized what a revolutionary fellow Prince really is.

The best part about writing in hieroglyphics is that each of us can change our names to whatever we want them to be. Think about how cool that is. Guys like Neil Diamond, George Bush and Tiger Woods could have loads of fun designing their new hieroglyphic names. Venus Williams too.

Of course, it might be difficult to distinguish between Chris Rock or Oliver Stone. Or Michael J. Fox and Scott Wolf. Little Richard might not be a fan either. But that's just the price of progress.

As for me, I've already called dibbs on the Batman symbol. Why? Because it's cool. And so am I.

At least that's my theory.