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Personally I think TLA's are a PITA (Pain In The Arse). You either have to expand them anyway to ensure that everyone reading the mail knows what you mean (as above) or you have to assume (one of the most dangerous words in the English language) that all the readers know what you mean; for example I had no idea what IANAL meant.
Good point, I'll try and think of where I'm emailing in future, and not presume because I'm on a techie list that the audience are "techies", or "nerds", depending on your interpretation :)
-- Nick Drage - half understanding Pegasus until he gets his LINUX partition sorted out......
The problem is that IANAL is NOT technical, it's just smart Alec, lazy and adds nothing to the text other than to slow it down, whereas NIC, URL, ISDN, MPC, CPU, HDD, SCSI, PCMCIA, POP3, SMTP, VDU, CAT5, MoDem, PCI, VGA, CMOS, TTL, CD, ROM, RAM, DIMM, POST, http, www, ad infinitum, have only one meaning in our context (apart from DVD which keeps changing!). I have to admit that I can never remember what PCMCIA stands for, but I know exactly what it is, an expensive to fill hole on the side of a laptop! :-( :-) etc. require little or now prior knowledge other than a predisposition of the brain to recognise faces, the need for the visual cortex to work a little harder and the muscles in the left and right hand side of the neck to contract in sequence. The other big difference is that they DO add to the text, being a shorthand for the emotion/mood of the author. Of course all shorthand is open to interpretation. :-)~ Adrian PS Nick, what is Pegasus ?