3 ms·

It's an initialism vs acronym thing: when the initials are treated as a word (e.g. NASA, but not BBC) you don't have to capitalise the whole thing (Hence 'Nasa'

• kryogen1c 6y ago
  > initialism vs acronym oh how interesting, ive never seen this debate before. I guess it confused because, internally, i dont treat acronyms as words. I dont think of NASA as Nasa or NATO as Nato, i find this counter-intuitive. to think out loud, this seems antithetical to what an acronym is in the first place. NASA is a pointer, not an object. creating a new object Nasa templated from the pointer NASA (not the object the pointer is referencing) makes my head hurt. the Bbc ( :-D ) does it, so apparently im the exception and not the normal.
  • oarsinsync 6y ago
    > the Bbc ( :-D ) does it, so apparently im the exception and not the normal. I assume the smiley indicates that you're aware that 'BBC' would actually be correct, and that 'Bbc' is not appropriate (because we say 'Bee Bee See', not 'Bubk'), unlike NATO/Nato ('Nay toe') Also, I prefer NATO over Nato personally. NATO reads 'Nay toe', while Nato reads 'Nat oh' in my head.
  • shellac 6y ago
    It's language evolution, in part. 'Radar' and 'scuba' are famous examples which have become regular names. At some point all-caps started to look pedantic, I suppose, or odd because their origin was not familiar to people.