Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Language specialists with the U.S. Army have decided the service needs to wean itself of some acronyms and jargon. A team of “terminologists” is working on redoing the Army’s Field Manual (FM 1-02), which currently is bloated with nearly 1,100 acronyms and about 2,000 operational terms.
“Acronyms are fun to create, but you sit there during a briefing, and after the 20th acronym [that] you don’t understand, the briefing becomes useless,” Dave Turek, chief of the Joint and Multinational Doctrine Division Combined Arms Doctrine, told Stars & Stripes.
The Army has become so obsessed with acronyms that it’s beginning to apply some to two different things. For instance, NCO—well established as standing for noncommissioned officer—could also be used for net-centric operations, if some Army officers have their way.
The terminologists want the service’s language to be more straightforward and less euphemized. “Kinetic” and “non-kinetic” will be replaced with “lethal” and “non-lethal.” The Army has already gotten rid of “warfighter” and replaced it with “soldier.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky
Wordsmiths Take Aim at Simplifying Acronyms for Army (by Mark Patton, Stars and Stripes)
DoD Dictionary of Military Terms (Department of Defense)
Replacing Government-Speak with Clear Words—U.S. Edition (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
Replacing Government-Speak with Clear Words (by David Wallechinsky, AllGov)
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