Bunch of fives: the things geeks say

We have worked hard to be recommended by the Plain English Campaign and it’s often in the face of severe resistance from an industry that seems to delight in being as obscure as possible. And as much as we admit that we love our geek-speak, here are some of the more obtuse acronyms that weary even us.

PHP
Computing has been with us as part of our lives so long now it has spawned its own traditions. Take PHP. It used to stand for Personal Home Page. Simples! Doh now however stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It’s as a recursive acronym, a geek tradition to choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. You made a funny! if you want to make us laugh, get a girlfriend.

WINE
Software that lets you run Windows programs (like the excellent Spotify) in Linux. It stands for 'Wine is not an emulator'. Unlike a wine waiter asking if you want white, red or rose, this doesn’t help anyone who doesn’t already know what WINE does; except promise the possiblity of an almighty headache.

RTFM
This is something we are guilty of failing to do much of the time. For geek speak it's pretty self explanatory - Read The Flipping (or some such other word beginning with F) Manual. While we have moments when we want to say this, it’s normally heard from techies who wrote the manual in language so dense and unfriendly that it's unintelligible to normal people.

XNA
This one causes rows in the office and it's just not right. This evil love child of PHP and WINE stands for.. wait for it wait for it.... XNA is Not an Acronym, therefore committing the sins of being recursive and not actually telling anyone what it is. It's Microsoft’s latest gaming language for anyone still awake.

TWAIN
No we don't mean Mark or Shania and purists will argue that it's not a true acronym but after XNA we no excuse for omitting it. In the computing world no-one actually knows what it used to stand for, if anything, but it’s now known as Technology Without An Interesting Name. The depth of imagination in programming circles is almost as breathtaking as the personal hygeine levels.