Quickie Post: Acronyms and Store Names

One of my pet peeves is the spelling of acronyms as words. There are a few common examples:

SEALs
The US Navy has an elite force knows as the SEALs. They do not have a collection of adorable sea mammals who jump from helicopters and land on beaches in the dead of night even though I think we can all agree that such a force would not only be awesome, but would exponentially increase the element of surprise to unmatched levels. Alas, they are humans with seemingly super-human abilities to operate successfully in all environments. They are able to kick ass at SEa, in the Air, and on Land. Thus, they are SEALs, not Seals.

NASA
I actually saw this as "Nasa" written in an article by a pretty reputable newspaper recently. It's understood that most government agencies' names in acronym form are letters that stand for longer words, right? So we didn't just name this agency "Nasa," but rather the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Then, because that's far too long to say in normal conversation, or even formal conversation, we recognized that we have enough vowels to that we could conjure up a real fake word out of the initials. Hence, "NASA." Not Nasa. Like a pet's name.

AIDS
AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Because those letters stand for something and the word is not a clever adaptation for a brand name (e.g. "Nabisco," which actually stands for "National Biscuit Company"), those letters should be capitalized. The disease is not "Aids." "Aids" is a misspelling of a collection of helpers. "AIDs" is marginally better, but the "syndrome" is really kind of important to the whole "disease" classification and all, so it really does need to be capitalized. Otherwise it's just Acquired Immune Deficiencies and that's just not the same.

I'm okay with "Scuba" because while it used to be just an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, it has become perfectly fine to refer to this type of underwater diving as "scuba." It's become its own word now. Navy SEALs, NASA and AIDS have not.

And, lastly, not all store names are possessive. It is not Barnes and Noble's. It is not Kroger's. It is most definitely not Target's OR Targets. There is but one Target and it is not in possession of anything.

Boyfriend's sister gave me this for Christmas and I think no one was surprised. Well, except for me considering I most assuredly did not make all As in my English classes. Granted, some of that isn't because I don't know how to punctuate (I try to use semi-colons when I'm supposed to but sometimes I don't when I should and do when I shouldn't) but because I didn't necessarily read the book about which I had to write a paper. Trying to get through Hawthorne's one long run-on sentence known as The Scarlet Letter was akin to torture for me and Lord of the Flies lost any fun when my teacher insisted that every single thing in that book was a symbol and never just how Golding pictured the characters or the setting. I did enjoy The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible but that's perhaps because they are significantly easier reads, though by no means as enthralling as Harry Potter. In eleventh grade, I also got to read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and felt sorry for all those suckers who didn't choose it for their papers.