I had a recent crit of a flash fiction piece based off number nine on my Top 10 Badly Named Story Ideas. The writer gave high level comments in the email and then said LBL below.
I could not for the life of me think what LBL meant. My day job was in travel and government which meant my life was filled with crazy acronyms. If you text or IM or slack, that seemed to be the breeding ground for even more acronyms.
So I dd what any red blooded American did and googled it.
The top result was Light Bladder Leakage.
I try to be funny, so it could have been a weird compliment, but just seemed wrong in context.
I clicked an acronym decoder site which listed 21 possible meanings.
My other two favorite possibilities were: Long Boozy Lunch and Left Buttock Line (location in aircraft). Both made me LOL.
The last one in the list was Line by Line. Bingo, that made so much more sense.
What was the oddest acronym you’ve encountered?
I hope everyone knows what WD-40 is. It stands for ‘Water Displacement – 40th Attempt. Apparently, that is in part the recipe for making it.
Ha! That’s a good one.
The medical field uses a ton of acronyms. One of the earlier ones that failed was C.O.L.D. for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease. Insurance reviewers took if for the good old common cold and denied claims. They changed it to C.O.P.D. which is Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.
The craziest one I ever came across was on night shift. I admitted a young man with CHI -KBC. We all knew the CHI meant Closed Head Injury. No one knew what KBC meant. We thought maybe Kidney, but nothing else fit. Generally, an ‘R’ for Renal is used and not kidney. The doctor came in early to check on his patient and I got a chance to ask him. KBC meant Kicked By Cow. I doubt that the insurance reviewers would accept that!