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MikeyD explain these initials


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I don't have any good examples ready at hand, but I remember reading that British soldiers in WWI regularly attached otherwise incomprehensible acronyms to the ends of their letters to their loved ones to get around the military censors, who apparently removed anything contrary to post-Victorian decorum as well as anything that might have military value. Of course, what they considered too racy to talk about in public wouldn't even provoke a yawn in the 21st century, though what they actually did in private sometimes made the Hellfire club look tame by comparison (read the footnotes to Richard Burton's translation of the 1001 Nights to get a bit of the flavor for this).

WWI Brits were particularly good at decyphering acronyms because of their extensive training in making sense out of otherwise incomprehensible crossword puzzles (the NYT crossword puzzle is a joke compared to the incredibly cryptic clues in even the easier British crosswords, which only a Brit can understand). Using strings of letters to represent complex phrases is entirely dependant on a unified, shared verbal culture. Our own is too fragmented at this point for effective condensed communication.

WTICRWIWTA (Would that I could remember what I was talking about).

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