One Family, One Dinner, Zero Initialisms: A Field Report From the Edge of Sanity

It started, as most family disasters do, with my mother asking a simple question at the wrong moment.

'Is the HVAC broken? It's freezing in here.'

And I — a person who recently wrote an entire article about how deeply acronym culture has rewired our brains — realized I had no idea how to say that sentence any other way. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. Four words. Who has that kind of time?

So I did what any reasonable content person would do: I banned initialisms at Sunday dinner and made everyone comply. Three generations. Ninety-four minutes. One rule: no acronyms, no initialisms, spoken or gestured. Here is the field report.

Minute 0–10: Confidence

The table was optimistic. My dad, 68, declared this 'easy' and then immediately said he needed to check his '401(k).' Strike one. He argued, correctly, that retirement accounts are 'basically just numbers,' but rules are rules, and he was forced to say 'my retirement account' like a man in a commercial from 1987.

My niece, 14, lasted four minutes before saying 'OMG,' caught herself, and then spent the next ten minutes saying 'oh my actual goodness' with the dead eyes of someone serving a prison sentence.

Minute 11–30: The Workarounds Begin

Humans, it turns out, will do almost anything to avoid saying a full phrase.

My brother, needing to say he'd 'BRB,' instead announced, 'I am temporarily relocating to the powder room and shall return.' He received a standing ovation from no one.

My mother, attempting to reference the TV remote, called it 'the clicker,' which is not an acronym but is a different kind of crime.

My sister-in-law tried to discuss her job in 'IT' and instead said, 'I work in... the computers.' Everyone stared. She stared back. Nobody recovered.

The hardest hit was my uncle Ray, whose entire conversational toolkit is federal agencies. Every story he tells involves the DMV, the IRS, or the FHA. Forced to speak plainly, he said, 'I fought with the motor vehicle people,' then, 'the tax people,' then gave up and told a story about 'the house loan people.' By the end, every institution in America was just 'the people.'

Minute 31–60: The Meltdowns

This is when things got philosophical.

My niece pointed out that 'laser' and 'scuba' are acronyms, technically, and therefore banned. This was ruled 'insane' by the table, 5–1, with the dissenting vote coming from my niece, who then asked if she could say 'radar.' She could not. She said 'the blippy thing that tells you about weather' and honestly? Poetry.

Then my dad tried a loophole: he spelled things out. 'I need to stop by the D-M-V.' RULING: Letter-by-letter spelling is still an initialism, just wearing a disguise. Denied. He said 'the license place' and looked at his plate for a long time afterward.

The lowest moment came when my grandmother — 84, silent until now, allegedly not understanding any of this — said, 'This is the most fun I've had since my book club read that memoir.' My mother asked which memoir. My grandmother said, 'The one about the navy wife,' and then, with visible satisfaction, 'P-S, I love you.'

She had weaponized the ban to say 'P.S.' out loud. A veteran of the game. We gave her the win. There was no point continuing.

Minute 61–94: The Quiet Truth

Something strange happened in the final stretch. Stripped of our shorthand, we slowed down. Sentences got longer but conversations got... better? My brother couldn't fire off 'LOL' at his own jokes, so he had to find out if they were actually funny by watching our faces. Terrifying for him. Great for us.

My niece described her day at school in full sentences and it took eleven minutes and contained an actual plot.

And I realized something uncomfortable: I say 'BRB' out loud. To people standing in front of me. In my own home. At some point, the keyboard crawled into our mouths and we never even noticed the move-in date.

The Verdict

Final score: one grandmother victory, two formal rulings from the table, one existential crisis (mine), and zero acronyms harmed, because you can't harm letters, although my dad tried.

Would I recommend the experiment? Absolutely, with one amendment: exempt 'P.S.' Grandma earned that one for life.

The scariest discovery wasn't how often we use initialisms. It's how much of our personality is stored in them. Take the shorthand away and you don't just get longer sentences — you get longer people. Slower, weirder, more honest ones.

See you at next Sunday's dinner. BYO patience. Wait. Bring your own patience. See? It's terminal.