ACRONYMS ARE ANTI-DEI!

STICKY NOTE MEDITATIONS ON THE SILENT GATEKEEPING OF LETTERS

Let’s begin where the sneakers meet the pavement:

Acronyms.

Those smug little clusters of letters that pretend they’re saving us time but in truth are really just glazing off insider status. They’re like the industry party name-dropping version of grammatical concepts. For instance, they don’t say Standard Operating Procedures, they say "SOPs" and wait for the nods. Similarly they don’t say Search Engine Optimization, they say "SEO" and God help the poor intern who didn’t know what that meant.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? The not knowing. That moment of disconnect where the listener—or reader—stops tracking the actual purpose of the meeting and starts quietly, shamefully deciphering the code in Googling. And yes, it is a code.

Acronyms are a velvet rope.

They’re like the passive-aggressive bouncers of language. Not yelling or overtly aggressive. Just there, like: “Oh… you didn’t know what LTV/CAC ratio meant? Ok, Weird.” Or: “This meeting is about ESG metrics—should be pretty basic.” And already someone feels ostracized or irrelevant or worse, less than basic.

Which brings me, begrudgingly, to the acronym DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The irony of using an acronym to advocate for linguistic inclusion is so thick (British slang) it could be its own TED Talk (see what I did there?—Technology, Entertainment & Design, not the overly optimistic football coach turned foot ball coach from the TV show). Nothing like a little self-righteous verse to make hypocrisy sound profound. You can’t advocate for inclusion using tools of exclusion.

I don’t mean this in the socially just and woke warrior, finger-wagging sense. I mean it in the most fundamental communicative way: If your goal is to reach people, teach people and/or connect people—then acronyms are thee enemy.

Because acronyms are not just shortcuts. They are assumptions. They assume familiarity. They assume context. They assume that the reader or listener is already initiated into their particular cult of jargon.

And let’s be real: most acronyms are born not from necessity, but from fatigue. A kind of intellectual laziness disguised as efficiency. When did we become so busy or too bored to say the full thing? So we reduce it? Minimize it? Package it into something tidy and toss it out, hoping it lands on someone who gets it.

On the other hand, meaning—real meaning—isn’t tidy. It’s sprawling and messy and wonderfully inconvenient. Language, at its best, is an invitation. Acronyms, by contrast, are like tests.

Here’s what I propose instead: Say the damn thing!

Say “personal protective equipment” instead of PPE the first time. Say “return on investment” at least once before sliding into ROI. Respect your audience enough to offer them context before expecting comprehension. You wouldn’t throw someone into a pool and expect them to keep up laps without checking if they can even float. So why do we allow this with our language?

The late, great David Markson once said that “the intellectual life of the whole of western society is being cheapened by the culture of abbreviation.” And maybe that sounds dramatic, but I think there’s truth in the idea that we’re slowly eroding nuance in favor of speed. In the process, we alienate the curious yet reward the rehearsed. Partly as a side effect of western society becoming more obsessed with what a thing looks like as opposed to how it feels.

So yes—acronyms are anti-DEI. They are anti-curiosity. Anti-learning. They whisper “this isn’t for you” when someone is already leaning in.

And let’s be honest, if you’re writing the acronym on a Canva presentation with no explanation, then what you’re really doing is hoping no one asks the question that exposes how little they—or maybe even you—actually understand the concept beneath it.

Let’s try this instead: Let language be a bridge, not a barrier.

And for the love of all that is acronymically unholy, stop assuming everyone knows what “BIPOC” means. Start assuming they don’t. That’s where the real inclusivity begins.

You can’t build equity with shortcuts.

You build it with clarity.

And clarity takes time.

And time, as it turns out, is the only real thing worth abbreviating

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