Words filled with meaning

Why you should never say "ATM machine"

Compared to other languages, English employs a relatively high number of acronyms and initialisms. According to linguists, this happens because English words tend to be short, and the word order is quite strict. While initialisms are easy to distinguish because they are not pronounced as a word, we don’t always recognize acronyms, especially when they refer to everyday things. Here are 11 popular acronyms and initialisms and their meaning.

When the scuba was invented in 1952 by Christian J. Lambertsen, it had a different name that, coincidentally, was also an acronym. Lambertsen had named his invention LARU, or ‘Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit’, but he changed it when it was time to apply for a patent. The name in the patent application was SCUBA, after ‘Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus’. Nowadays, scuba is a word of its own and has developed into words like scuba-diving.

In 1955, scientists who had developed a microwave radiation technology patented it as MASER or ‘Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation’. A few years later, American physicist Gordon Gould developed a similar technology, this time using light instead of microwaves. Following the pattern of MASER, he registered it as LASER or ‘Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation’. While the scientific community initially referred to this technology as the "optical maser", Gould’s acronym quickly became the preferred term.

If you’ve ever used the phrase "ATM machine", you need to know that you’re saying ‘machine’ twice. But don’t worry, this is a common error stemming from the fact that many people don’t know that ATM stands for ‘Automated Teller Machine’, a name that creates a parallelism between ATMs and bank tellers. Although the ATM was installed in 1967 in a London bank, no one really knows who was the first to call it ‘ATM’ instead of ‘cash-dispensing machine’.

The use of radio waves as a detection mechanism dates back to the late 19th century, but it was not properly developed until the 1920s, when the U.S. Navy started creating the first modern radars. By the Second World War, most military powers were using radio wave detection, but the technology did not have a name. In 1940, Lieutenant-Commanders Samuel M. Tucker and F. R. Furth of the U.S. Navy decided to come up with a code name and, after trying several phrases, landed on ‘Radio Detection And Ranging’, or RADAR.

If you are not familiar with the term CAPTCHA, you might recognize it as the test used by websites to make sure that you are human and not a robot. While clicking a box or selecting a picture is simple for a human, it’s extremely hard for a machine. What does the term CAPTCHA stand for? ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’. The name contains a reference to the Turing test —a method used to check if machines can behave like humans— and the acronym also functions as a portmanteau of ‘capture’ and ‘gotcha’.

If you follow international politics, you might have heard about NATO, a military alliance between several countries, the U.S. included. But have you ever wondered what NATO stands for? This alliance was established with the signing of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty by several European and North American nations, and its name stands for ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’.

The discussions around GIF tend to focus on whether it’s pronounced "gif" or "jif", and one would think that the meaning of the acronym would shed some light on the matter, but it doesn’t. GIF stands for ‘Graphics Interchange Format’, a reference to its development to transfer compressed images across computers. While the ‘g’ in ‘graphic’ would suggest that the correct pronunciation is "gif", creator Steve Wilhite has stated that the acronym was modelled after the peanut butter brand Jif, and should be pronounced in the same way.

The BBC is one of the most famous broadcasters in the world, and its name is so iconic that it has evolved from an initialism to the official name for the company. Established in 1923 as the British Broadcasting Company, initialized as BBC, it became officially known as the BBC when the company transitioned from private to public. The BBC has become so connected with standard British culture that "BBC English" has been historically promoted as the standard speech for newscasters and network announcers.

Nowadays, we use the term CEO in corporate settings, but did you know that its origins are military and political? The first records of CEO as ‘Chief Executive Officer’ date back to legal and government texts from the 1780s, and the term is used in reference to leaders and state governors. However, the term would not become popular until the 1970s, when it was adopted by the corporate world for the highest-ranking person in a company.

When acronyms for an invention include a name, it’s often the name of its inventor. But sometimes, as it happened with the TASER, they include a name that has nothing to do with the person behind the invention. The TASER was developed by Jack Cover, but its acronym stands for ‘Tom A. Swift's Electric Rifle’. Who is Tom Swift? The protagonist of the 1911 science fiction novel_._ Cover added the ‘A’ initial to the name to make the acronym easier to pronounce.

When the U.S. Postal Service created its postal code system, also known as a ZIP code, they used an acronym for the name, but the meaning of the acronym was not really important. ZIP stands for ‘Zone Improvement Plan’, but this phrase doesn’t make complete sense. This is because the USPS was more interested in using the name ZIP to convey the idea that using postal codes would make deliveries faster and more efficient than what these letters stood for.

Customer success vocabulary

"Are we ready to order?" The true reason servers use the first person

There's a reason why a handful of phrases keep coming at us from public-facing workers across many industries. Decades and decades of trial and error have taught brands which words put customers at ease, which expressions to reach for, and which to avoid at all costs — like "unfortunately" or "I don’t know that." Let's explore 10 of the vocabulary tools used by waiters, hosts, receptionists, and customer service reps, and the real reasoning behind each one.

Have you ever been left wondering why your waitress keeps speaking in the first-person plural? That plural "we" has a name: linguists call it "the royal we", or nosism, meaning the substitution of a group pronoun for a singular one. Monarchs used it for centuries to speak as though they embodied an entire nation; King Edward VII was still doing it in official documents as late as 1902.

It’s unclear when restaurant servers picked up the habit, but it works. By including themselves in the sentence, waiters imply that every step of the dining experience is a team activity that they lead gladly.

When you thank your barista, receptionist, or cashier, you are more likely to hear "no problem" than "you’re welcome". This one stems from naturally friendly and gallant behavior that has set in society in recent decades.

Linguist Aaron Dinkin studied the phenomenon in 2017 and confirmed that younger speakers had opted out of "you’re welcome," since it suggests that effort was spent and is being graciously accepted. "No problem" is a humble assurance that the help cost nothing at all, even if it’s a little white lie at least half of the time.

Here’s something a customer never wants to hear: "Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about that." Experts advise never to use that adverb in the face of a customer’s problem, since it suggests the company is powerless or worse, indifferent.

Instead, the magic words to use are these: "Here's what I'm going to do for you." That will instantly please a customer who is looking for possible solutions. The phrase can be traced back to a 1980 policy at the Ritz-Carlton, where co-founder Horst Schulze gave every employee the authority to spend up to $2,000 per guest fixing a problem on the spot.

In 1936, Dale Carnegie wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People that a person's name is "the sweetest and most important sound in any language," and customer service training is careful to apply that wisdom.

Hearing your own name signals that you're being treated as a person rather than a ticket number. Modern software made the trick easier, since caller ID and account records now hand an agent your name before they've said hello. It can backfire, though; hearing one’s name repeatedly in the middle of a heated conversation can become irritating and sound like mockery.

An alternative to this one is "that would upset me, too." These phrases are a nod to the notion that the client is always right. Companies now admit that the latter is not necessarily true, though, but that often, indulging a customer's complaint, however unreasonable, is cheaper than losing their trust.

"That shouldn't have happened" updates the idea: it validates how a customer feels without declaring them factually correct. Researchers coined the term "service recovery paradox" in 1992 after finding that customers who complain and get an empathetic, competent response often end up more loyal than customers who never had a problem at all.

The two most empathetic words an agent can say are these. The concept behind it is called "active listening." It was so named in a 1957 essay by psychologist Carl Rogers and Richard Farson, and it didn't come from business at all. It came from Rogers's therapy sessions, where he found that people couldn't move toward a solution until they felt genuinely heard first.

Sales trainers later built an entire technique around the same insight, nicknamed "Feel, Felt, Found," which opens with exactly this line before pivoting to a fix. The order matters more than the words, because agents know that offering a solution before acknowledging the feeling can make people argue harder.

This is the go-to sentence to use instead of a dreaded "I can't help you with that." In the industry, this is called a "warm transfer," as opposed to the far more common and far more resented "cold transfer," where you're bounced to a stranger who has no idea why you called and makes you start over. Ideally, a rep will personally explain your problem to another expert and build a bigger team to come up with solutions.

This is the euphemism phrase to use in place of "I don't know." It’s friendly, humble, and a preamble to a brief research that will follow. Technically, saying "That’s a great question" in a conversation is a stalling tactic. It borrows a few seconds through flattery while the brain scrambles for an answer.

In 1963, a Worcester, Massachusetts commercial artist named Harvey Ball was paid $45 to design a simple smiling face for an insurance company, State Mutual Life Assurance, meant only to boost employee morale. Seven years later, two Philadelphia brothers paired the design with the words "Have a Happy Day," soon changed to "Have a Nice Day," trademarked the combination, and sold more than 50 million pins by 1972.

The four words have now become the obligatory send-away greeting that some businesses even write in their windows. It has also become the default sign-off for practically every customer transaction in America; "goodbye" might sound too dramatic.

"Found everything ok?" That question usually greets customers when they reach the cashier in retail stores. It can be traced back to Walmart's national "People Greeter" program in the 1980s, designed to do two things at once: make shoppers feel noticed and discourage theft.

The restaurant version of the same check-in is the "How’s everything?" a few minutes after bringing the food to the table. Waiters are trained to ask this to spot possible complaints early on, and also to remind customers that someone’s paying attention to their experience.