I've continued to sleep much, much more than any reasonable person needs to sleep (and it's not as if I'm living a particularly active lifestyle right now to justify it). Hm. We'll see what this week holds on that front.
-----------------------------------------------
What I really wanted to write about is acronyms. When I interned that summer in DC with Justice (or DoJ, if you prefer), we were told frequently that government runs on acronyms. There was certainly no shortage in my office -- from the software to other divisions in the Department to the government agencies we represented, long and awkward Official Government Titles were abbreviated. Conversations with friends working for other agencies or, worse, Congress, were often confused by acronym-dropping, which was then followed by attempt-to-remember-what-it-stands-for-so-as-to-explain-it-ing.
One of the Things I Learned This Year is that no job is safe from acronyms. The bureaucracy of higher education means that, in addition to a confusing and convoluted organizational chart, my job can best be described as the locus of overlapping acronyms: the departments to which I am responsible, the tasks I perform, the spaces I am assigned to work in. It took some learning when I first arrived to get everything straight, and even now, every so often I mix up the folders on my work computer, saving a CLE document in an LLC folder or searching for a JCPS template amidst the JCSQ files.
I have been (amusedly) surprised, however, that those, wait-I-should-explain-that-acronym moments from the hot sticky summer of 2005 have not disappeared with my co-workers and my increased age (and maturity?). I do my best not to throw around three-letter combinations ("WAP!", which, seriously, is one of my job requirements) in front of people who don't already know them, mostly because I hate being put on the spot and trying to remember what each letter stands for. I usually try to adapt the jargon of the job to common-usage terms, which, though approximate, keep both parties to a conversation on the same page, more or less. Like I say "class" instead of "module", or "language lounge" instead of "CIEd". But there have definitely been meetings when co-workers have just slung acronyms around with no regard for listeners' comprehension. It's ok to say, "I just feel like the balance of my responsibilities between the CLE and the LLC isn't very transparent," at a staff meeting, but a casual listener can only nod along and hope you explain yourself at some time in the future. Which may happen eventually, or the point may be dropped, lingering in the other party's mind only as an open question, maybe an admission of a little piece of ignorance.
Acronyms are funny that way. They're also funny in Chinese, where a phrase made up of multi-syllabic words (and thus several lexican units which each have more than one morpheme) can be abbreviated by taking the first character from each word. It's, I suppose, fundamentally the same process as in English (or the closest possible analogue). But an English acronym often forms its own word, if the title so-abbreviated was judiciously chosen, whereas a Chinese acronym becomes a string of characters that, when placed next to each other, confuse the heck out of me. Basically, most individual characters have some kind of usage or meaning on their own, as well as being parts of other multi-syllabic words which are usually related in sound or meaning (which is where you get compound word translations like "rickshaw = cart's child" or "Mister = first born"). But when you get two characters next to each other that don't seem to have anything to do with one another, I get lost. Example: Sun Yat-sen University = Sun Zhongshan Daxue ~ "zhong da". So.
----------------------------------------------
Also: how is it already march?!?! I feel like I didn't do *anything* in february after Chinese New Year. And now, seriously, the urgency of my weekly to-do list tasks like "find job" should be hitting home and motivating me. Right? Please?
-----------------------------------------------
What I really wanted to write about is acronyms. When I interned that summer in DC with Justice (or DoJ, if you prefer), we were told frequently that government runs on acronyms. There was certainly no shortage in my office -- from the software to other divisions in the Department to the government agencies we represented, long and awkward Official Government Titles were abbreviated. Conversations with friends working for other agencies or, worse, Congress, were often confused by acronym-dropping, which was then followed by attempt-to-remember-what-it-stands-for-so-as-to-explain-it-ing.
One of the Things I Learned This Year is that no job is safe from acronyms. The bureaucracy of higher education means that, in addition to a confusing and convoluted organizational chart, my job can best be described as the locus of overlapping acronyms: the departments to which I am responsible, the tasks I perform, the spaces I am assigned to work in. It took some learning when I first arrived to get everything straight, and even now, every so often I mix up the folders on my work computer, saving a CLE document in an LLC folder or searching for a JCPS template amidst the JCSQ files.
I have been (amusedly) surprised, however, that those, wait-I-should-explain-that-acronym moments from the hot sticky summer of 2005 have not disappeared with my co-workers and my increased age (and maturity?). I do my best not to throw around three-letter combinations ("WAP!", which, seriously, is one of my job requirements) in front of people who don't already know them, mostly because I hate being put on the spot and trying to remember what each letter stands for. I usually try to adapt the jargon of the job to common-usage terms, which, though approximate, keep both parties to a conversation on the same page, more or less. Like I say "class" instead of "module", or "language lounge" instead of "CIEd". But there have definitely been meetings when co-workers have just slung acronyms around with no regard for listeners' comprehension. It's ok to say, "I just feel like the balance of my responsibilities between the CLE and the LLC isn't very transparent," at a staff meeting, but a casual listener can only nod along and hope you explain yourself at some time in the future. Which may happen eventually, or the point may be dropped, lingering in the other party's mind only as an open question, maybe an admission of a little piece of ignorance.
Acronyms are funny that way. They're also funny in Chinese, where a phrase made up of multi-syllabic words (and thus several lexican units which each have more than one morpheme) can be abbreviated by taking the first character from each word. It's, I suppose, fundamentally the same process as in English (or the closest possible analogue). But an English acronym often forms its own word, if the title so-abbreviated was judiciously chosen, whereas a Chinese acronym becomes a string of characters that, when placed next to each other, confuse the heck out of me. Basically, most individual characters have some kind of usage or meaning on their own, as well as being parts of other multi-syllabic words which are usually related in sound or meaning (which is where you get compound word translations like "rickshaw = cart's child" or "Mister = first born"). But when you get two characters next to each other that don't seem to have anything to do with one another, I get lost. Example: Sun Yat-sen University = Sun Zhongshan Daxue ~ "zhong da". So.
----------------------------------------------
Also: how is it already march?!?! I feel like I didn't do *anything* in february after Chinese New Year. And now, seriously, the urgency of my weekly to-do list tasks like "find job" should be hitting home and motivating me. Right? Please?
posted by sam at
11:28 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home