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An eye chart with the phrase, "WTDWA" repeated.

This is a VIP (Very Important Post) with some UAE (Understanding, Analysis, and Evaluation) from an SOB (guess) on acronyms.

The following Brologue post is an adaptation of a critical essay I spun up in a few days for St. Andrews. It concerned ‘an English literature topic,’ but as you’ll see, I decided to massage that criteria a bit and draw on other fields to explore the phenomenal nature of the dynamics between language and power. There’s a bit of anthropology, and a bit of linguistics, and a wee bit of politics. My citations are now footnotes, and my footnotes are now slightly longer footnotes with my citations inside of them, because I’m lazy and I don’t know how to do footnotes in footnotes with WordPress.

Enjoy!

What’s the deal with acronyms? At a glance, they’re an innocent shorthand for familiar concepts. They might, themselves, form a familiar word which bears some quality relative to the thing it represents. Nowadays, however, the acronym finds itself in an epistemological quagmire. Like a linguistic black box, we don’t need to understand what’s behind an acronym to feel a chill down our spines. Somewhere, they became vessels for obfuscating and playing shell games with knowledge, and we’ve lost faith in them. Are acronyms the problem, or does the fault lie in those who create and use them? In what ways is our disillusionment reflected in the written word?

Take, for instance, the USA PATRIOT Act: signed into law after the September 11 attacks, the name oozes nationalism, as if it intended to defibrillate the nation’s heart after it experienced the deadliest terrorist attack in its two hundred and twenty-five-year history. When fully unrolled, the acronym stands for, “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” Enemies of America, beware: the drums are beating, by Jingo.

In legal lingo, USA PATRIOT was considered a ‘must-pass’ legislation. If it’s a response to an extant, overwhelming issue – natural disasters, pandemics, national security threats, and so on – then it’s must-pass. To lobbyists, they present golden opportunities to smuggle unpopular policies with little backlash. In that respect, must-pass bills are like whales – and anything a loophole-seeking lobbyist might add is a load of barnacles.

In USA PATRIOT’s case, the confusion is twofold: The title leaves the definition of ‘patriot’ so open-ended, it’s an Ouroboros; legal prose is notorious for having all the opacity of Vantablack, warping reality for all but the few trained to interpret it. Combined with time pressure, must-pass bills seldom receive the scrutiny they’re due. The act intended to force banks to perform thorough due diligence on clients at home and abroad1. The spirit of these measures seems to be clear: prevent political adversaries from money laundering. However, these measures were never applied to the real estate sector2, not least because senators had too much to review in too little time. To this day, anyone is free to money-launder anonymously by buying properties through shell companies. Those in power who wish to consolidate it almost certainly do.

Leading the overview of the 20th February, 2024 edition of BBC Sounds’ Word of Mouth podcast is a quote from Financial Times columnist and cultural anthropologist Gillian Tett: “If you want to hide something in the 21st century world, you don’t need to create a James Bond style plot. Just cover it in acronyms”3. Let’s expand upon that: people with power don’t need intricate, clandestine operations to maintain power. Nor do they go about their business with the ironic grin of a cat-stroking mastermind who seems to know all. They can, however, obfuscate their actions by using language deliberately designed to disorient anyone not part of their in-group, such as reporters. The result is, to paraphrase Johnathan Swift, a lie that flies, while the truth comes limping after.

Tett’s interview was backdropped by her 2022 book, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life. In its fourth chapter, she recalls her attendance to the European Securitization Forum of 2005, and how her background as a cultural anthropologist in Tajikistan let her see the conference from a fresh perspective – one that could familiarise the conference’s aims with her readers. In the culture of finance, she notes, it’s very rare for journalists to have as much freedom to quiz financiers as, say, an ethnographer walking around a Tajik village, camera in hand, asking everyone about their lives. There are almost always intermediaries – public relations officials, security personnel, and so on – that make a study of ‘”the power elite”… “in their natural habitat”‘4 impossible. Conferences are an exception. At the securitization forum, everyone spoke freely about CDOs, CDSes, ABSes and CLOs as though everyone else knew which hymn sheet to sing from. Everyone had their own variant of the securitization creation myth – that is, why debts and risks should be made easy to trade, and thus why markets needed to be ‘liquid.’ Reaffirming their ties to each other, they even had their own rituals – be it congregating around hot, buzzing projectors to watch PowerPoints, or golf tours.

Following the securitization forum, and with her foot in the door, Tett began to learn the language of the finance world by interviewing bankers. She compared the chopped-up, pick’n’mix debts contained in collateral debt obligations (CDOs) to different sources of meat being minced together to make sausages. Credit default swaps (CDSes) were just the financier’s version of betting on a spotted or striped jockey for the Grand National. She leveraged language to put these esoteric practices into layman’s terms; not one financier she conversed with, however, could give her the top-down, holistic, bird’s eye view of of the CDO or CDS markets that everyone else claimed they had. Everyone had their own part of the gamut, but never the full thing. They were trusted to see to how money went around the world, and assured, through their own creation myths, that they knew what was going on, yet no-one (media reporters and financiers alike) fully knew what their language really meant, or how their systems worked.

For journalists, their financial argot was difficult to pierce – but as Tett showed, not impossible. She, as a participant observer, saw developments unfold through the eyes of a stranger, a child, an alien, while the financiers saw them through the eyes of each other; at the 2007 World Economic Forum, her work was decried as scaremongering by a powerful US diplomat5. Ironically, she argues, it was this inability on both sides of the fence to see the strange in what was familiar (and vice versa) that precipitated the financial crash of 2008.

Tett compared the jargon emerging amongst financiers to learning a new language. In so doing, she has opened the possibility to juxtapose it with language planning. Yule illustrates a common educational dilemma for local jurisdictions [Yule 2015]. In places where English is not the primary language of the home – say, among the residents of San Antonio, Texas, who speak English, but prefer to consume media in Spanish – should school curricula nevertheless be set in English? We might ask the same of British English in Scotland, where Scots and English are spoken interchangeably. This problem is further compounded in areas where residents are represented by multiple minority languages. Whoever sets the language sets the discourse; a decision has to be made, and some people will be disadvantaged. We see this in finance when some action is taken that warrants calling out – communications are painfully euphemised not out of habit, but as a reflex6.

This is not a novel by-product of sprawling administration: When William Caxton translated French works into English for the first time, he single-handedly chose to transfer many words verbatim, without translation. Though he is credited with introducing the printing press to England, making books a more accessible commodity, his translations, ironically, made many of the first printed books in English inaccessible to all but the highest social strata.

Acronyms did not cause the crash. It can certainly be frustrating when they’re used to make information more opaque and difficult to follow for outsiders. Acronyms can also be teaching aids; in some cases, they can save lives [NHS 2022]. There’s a world of difference between a computing student struggling to remember the seven layers of the OSI model with a nonsense mnemonic7 and journalists who, as strangers in a strange land, need to find meaning before a deadline. This is not strictly an essay about acronyms so much as it is about the relation between language and power. Whoever sets the discourse has the power to control and constrain contributions made by non-powerful participants8. The deal with acronyms, then, is who deals them.

Literature – fiction, and non-fiction – absolutely has the power to pick apart language intentionally designed to be vague and obtuse. Writers can make labyrinthian ideas, waived as being too complex for one person to understand, incandescent for all to see. Cory Doctorow’s noir thriller The Bezzle (2024) offers an insightful deconstruction of a corporate tax evasion scheme. Lionel Coleman Jr. (“Junior”), one of the novel’s antagonists, expanded his family’s fortunes into Avalon, California, through a real estate loophole. Martin Hench, forensic accountant and protagonist, explains: the 1999 REIT Modernization Act loosened regulations around real estate investment trusts (REITs); Junior sold his family’s hotels to a REIT to avoid paying rent tax; REITs own a separate company called a taxable REIT subsidiary (TRS), and this allowed him to also avoid paying income tax. Junior, as an operant of the private sector, shelters more of his taxable income that would otherwise balance the government’s spending on public services. From hotels, Junior moved on and put his tax-free profits into strip malls and apartment blocks. But all this back-and-forth, just to make a tax-free profit, is (supposedly) on a scale far too large for us to understand!

On their own, the terms ‘real estate investment trust’ and ‘taxable REIT subsidiary’ are hardly self-explanatory, like the must-pass bills discussed earlier. We can identify them as characters in a sentence, but they’re too abstract – even when matched to actions, what they’re doing still seems unclear9. Here, Doctorow, like Tett, uses metaphor to de-alienate these concepts, give them form, and clarify Junior’s actions. Hench reduces the scheme to little more than a shell game, where auditors are expected to find the pea – or taxable income – moving between the cups – the family business, the REIT, and the TRS. What Junior did was perfectly legal, but morally bankrupt; what turns this from a wannabe magician’s first act of sorcery to confidence trick is the intent to gain an unfair advantage.

In Chapter 5, Hench explains to his chauffeur, Antonio, that he, as well as most of the residents of Avalon, has bought into a fast food Ponzi scheme to which Junior is the founder. Reality slowly dawns on him: any money that could have been made through the scheme has long since trickled to the top. What Antonio has just been through is described as a ‘bezzle:’ the time before the victim realises they’ve been scammed, where both they and the con artist feel they have profited. This scene is also an implicit callback to Chapter 3: Loopholes are only considered ‘exploited’ in retrospect. To the reader, even if Junior’s previous shell games aren’t understood on a second or third read, Hench’s revelation to Antonio crystallises the emotion felt knowing that a powerful person has controlled and constrained a group of non-powerful people.

Discussing power and language in literature, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four may be considered a keystone commentary on language and power as reinforced by state violence. In an appendix dissecting the Party’s Newspeak project, Orwell argued that a reduced dictionary would not only inhibit Oceanians from expressing critical thought – they would be literally unthinkable. He gives the second paragraph of the United States’ Declaration of Independence as an example: Any meaning the original passage has would be compressed into ‘crimethink’10.

We should keep in mind that Newspeak is an absolute solution proposed by an absolute authority. Orwell is known to have been influenced by popular linguistic determinism theories of the day. The ‘strong’ version, woven into the objectives of Newspeak, draws an absolute line on how language relates to cognition. Namely, if one’s native language controls how one thinks, then it’s possible to create a language proofed against subversion, against euphemism. As has hopefully been shown, real life is not so black and white. No amount of arbitrary state violence can change the fact that we can think about and use language subversively.

We can create strange language; we can also unpick it, to find something familiar, and show our betters to be no cleverer nor more exceptional than ourselves. While that doesn’t always mean we’re at liberty to take action, literature’s ability to succinctly describe how we feel can only galvanise the call for justice. A financier can wrap up a new technique or risk in all manner of acronyms and jargon to look like decent practice; a politician can put a hundred-thousand RPM positive spin on handing control of the water supply over to a private equity; a lie can fly a thousand miles, but the truth, like the humans that look for it, has the stamina to limp until it’s time to roost.

  1. 2001, USA Patriot Act Title III, Subtitle A, Section 312. Available at: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-107publ56/pdf/PLAW-107publ56.pdf ↩︎
  2. Max de Haldevang, 2019,The surprisingly effective pilot program stopping real estate money laundering in the US. Quartz. Available at: https://qz.com/1635394/how-the-us-can-stop-real-estate-money-laundering ↩︎
  3. Rosen, M. and Tett, G., 2024, “How to Think Like an Anthropologist, with Gillian Tett”. [Podcast] British Broadcasting Corporation. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001wjf9 ↩︎
  4. Tett, G., 2022. Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life, pp150-152. Avid Reader Press. ↩︎
  5. Ibid., pp165-167 ↩︎
  6. This reflex is easily observed whenever a company decides to announce layoffs. Two examples, in particular, stick out: First, a 2012 article from The Atlantic reporting on a layoff announcement from Citigroup:

    https://archive.is/rTrtY

    Second, an email response to an applicant for Discord shortly after it announced it would lay off 17% of its workforce:

    https://archive.is/tfn5h

    If they’re any measure, this is how these announcements tend to go: Shift any and all focus away from immediate negative impacts to employees, and emphasise promises of an improved service to customers. ↩︎
  7. The OSI model is a theoretical frame that a network technician might use to diagnose internet connection problems. It abstracts seven stages of communication between two computer systems: Physical, Data link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, Application. One technique to memorise this is to instead memorise a nonsense phrase that, at the bare minimum, tells a story (
    Oakley, B. and Schewe, O., 2021. Learn Like a Pro: Science-Based Tools to Become Better at Anything, pp96-98. St. Martin’s Essentials.). This writer recalls one such telling: “Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away.” ↩︎
  8. Fairclough, N., 2015. Language and Power, pp75-76. Routledge. ↩︎
  9. Williams, J. M. and Bizup, J., 2013. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Eleventh Edition, pp30-33. Pearson plc. ↩︎
  10. Orwell, G., 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp354-355. Penguin Books. ↩︎