Will readers know your shorthand?
The first line of a writer’s Facebook post gave me pause:
“I spoke to a class of nursing students via Zoom about our experiences with FTD.”
I could only guess the meaning of those initials. Decades ago, broadcaster Arthur Godfrey had often advertised Florists’ Telegraph Delivery: FTD. But I doubted this writer told nursing students how to send flowers.
Her second sentence offered a clue:
“This came out through the providence of God and my friend, Dr. Kia Hendrix Countess, who is not only the FIRST person we met at our church here but also a nursing instructor with a specialty in dementia care.”
Could the D in FTD refer to dementia?
Google came to my rescue, but only after multiple diversions. As I began to type FTD meaning, these options appeared: ftd meaning in banking, ftd meaning in sales, ftd full form, and ftd coupon. I clicked on full form.
Under one listing I saw: 13 meanings of FTD – Acronyms and Slang, acronymsandslang.com › business-and-finance › FTD
Urbandictionary.com didn’t help with its explanation that FTD stood for a vulgarity that could serve as an “expression used to describe when somebody goes beast mode,” whatever beast mode might mean.
I asked Google again, including both FTD and dementia. Finally, I learned the meaning for the initials: “Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) or frontotemporal degenerations refers to a group of disorders caused by progressive nerve cell loss in the brain’s frontal lobes … ”
All those distractions came because someone writing on Facebook assumed all her friends automatically knew her meaning for an initialism.
If you’re writing just to a tightly focused audience, you’re safe. In the Facebook group for the Model A Ford Club, people confidently refer to their RPU (roadster pickup) or CCPU (closed cab pickup). But if others stumble into that group, how would they know a CCPU from a CPU? And does CPU mean a computer’s central processing unit or a hospital’s chest pain unit?
Unless you write only to insiders, apply the advice taught on page 1 of the Associated Press Stylebook: “Do not use abbreviations that the reader would not quickly recognize.”
