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Article: Alphabet soup: there are a lot of acronyms out there. We'll help you sort them out.
- Article from:
- Mechanical Engineering-CIME
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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ENGINEERS LOVE ACRONYMS, and they admit it freely. They should; their lives are filled with them. On the engineering technology side alone, there's CAD, CAM, CAE, PEA, PDM, PLM, and those, of course, are just the beginning. Three-or-more-letter acronyms can be a way of simplifying the world. Who wants to use long phrases to describe commonly referenced ideas that could be rendered in understandable shorthand--or be made maddeningly obtuse.
"Acronyms serve a useful purpose to people in a certain industry because they know right away what area you're referring to without having to go into a long, elaborate explanation," said John Krouse, editor of Engineering ...