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Ridiculous how? I don't think you addressed anything in my post. e.g. the notion that simplifying 'VAPA' to 'Arts Department' improves communication, and partic

Ridiculous how? I don't think you addressed anything in my post. e.g. the notion that simplifying 'VAPA' to 'Arts Department' improves communication, and particularly to certain groups of people who aren't being reached. How is improved communication self-parody? This isn't a law mandating speech, it's an organisation rebranding itself to communicate more clearly what it is. You do ridicule it by comparing it to use of other acronyms. I hope you can understand that there's a difference between use of acronyms of an Arts programme of a single school in a local area. These acronyms may be entirely unfamiliar to groups of people that historically have lower-access and that you're trying to reach via communications, and acronyms don't help in this situation, and are also unnecessary. Versus the use of an acronym that represents about 5-10% of the world population (0.6 billion people), and is used and recognised on a worldwide scale, and is actually one of the major driving forces of communication. Acronyms in this case do help, and actually improve communication. (of course, there is a limit to the logic. And the communities themselves are constantly reevaluating what typology makes most sense, and which acronyms make most sense).

imgabe 5y ago
Was there any evidence that the acronyms were a major cause of people not accessing the programs? Did anyone reach out and ask one of these people from "certain communities" about why they weren't making use of the programs? Did anyone actually look at the people using the program and verify that the "certain communities" were even underrepresented to begin with? Did anyone compare the makeup of people in the program after the name change to see if it increased representation? Or maybe people just took a preconceived notion like "people who clean toilets for a living are probably too dumb to look up what an acronym means" and then made a pointless change that affected nothing and patted themselves on the back for how nice and progressive they are. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that if you're working (probably multiple) low wage jobs to support your kids, your biggest hurdle to getting them into an Arts program is probably not that it has a confusing acronym. I agree that referring to something by an acronym and never explaining what it refers to is bad communication. That's why it is a common practice (and basic common sense) to spell out the acronym the first time it's used in a document. If the website for your organization refers to the name by an acronym only and never says what the full name is, that is a terribly designed website and you should fire whoever wrote it. That is the sort of thing you do when you care about communicating clearly. Changing the names of things every 5 minutes as you denounce the previous name as horribly offensive is not about communicating clearly. It's about moral posturing and virtue signalling.

imgabe 5y ago

Was there any evidence that the acronyms were a major cause of people not accessing the programs? Did anyone reach out and ask one of these people from "certain communities" about why they weren't making use of the programs? Did anyone actually look at the people using the program and verify that the "certain communities" were even underrepresented to begin with? Did anyone compare the makeup of people in the program after the name change to see if it increased representation? Or maybe people just took a preconceived notion like "people who clean toilets for a living are probably too dumb to look up what an acronym means" and then made a pointless change that affected nothing and patted themselves on the back for how nice and progressive they are. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that if you're working (probably multiple) low wage jobs to support your kids, your biggest hurdle to getting them into an Arts program is probably not that it has a confusing acronym. I agree that referring to something by an acronym and never explaining what it refers to is bad communication. That's why it is a common practice (and basic common sense) to spell out the acronym the first time it's used in a document. If the website for your organization refers to the name by an acronym only and never says what the full name is, that is a terribly designed website and you should fire whoever wrote it. That is the sort of thing you do when you care about communicating clearly. Changing the names of things every 5 minutes as you denounce the previous name as horribly offensive is not about communicating clearly. It's about moral posturing and virtue signalling.