If nothing else, that comic just crystalized why I don't like spelling out the acronym (instead of just saying what the acronym means): it's like laughing at your own joke. Which, granted, works sometimes, but one key about humor is -- on some level -- being unaware (or a successful pretense of unawareness) that you're quite that funny. In other words, self-aware humor is more likely to go flat as the punch line, I think, unless one's self-aware humor is the punch line.
But you're right, we're moving towards a generalized sense of spelling, but even in some military/govt acronym-using stories, I see characters spelling out acronyms like "NDU" as "En-dee-you" while other acronyms are not spelled out, like "POTUS" (poe-tuss) to indicate where an acronym has become a kind of word in its own right. ZOMG may move towards that, but it's not an easily legible one, still.
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Date: 14 Jan 2009 07:15 pm (UTC)But you're right, we're moving towards a generalized sense of spelling, but even in some military/govt acronym-using stories, I see characters spelling out acronyms like "NDU" as "En-dee-you" while other acronyms are not spelled out, like "POTUS" (poe-tuss) to indicate where an acronym has become a kind of word in its own right. ZOMG may move towards that, but it's not an easily legible one, still.