Abbreviations are always a potential source of confusion. Some people might happen to know what OED stands for, and can figure out what NOAD must mean, but others may not be so lucky. Googling for PIE is rather useless even for native speakers, and completely perplexing to non-native ones.
Thus,...
Generally speaking though, I do understand your frustration. That's a somewhat obscure and out of the way webpage for most visitors, so I usually try to spell out the abbreviation and assign it with parenthesis every time I use one, even in cases where I think the abbreviation should be obvious such as with the Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.).
It is also especially important in my case though since I am not sure how many other people use the A.D.E.L. abbreviation for An American Dictionary of the English Language, and I am almost certain that the first thing people think of when they read C.D.C. is the Center for Disease Control rather than the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia unless otherwise specified.
@Tonepoet When I first saw OED in the posts of the site of English Language & Usage, I didn't know what it represents; it wasn't obvious for me at all and I wondered why most people writing OED don't write out what OED represents for even once in their posts; I didn't find out what it represents until I experienced a lot of frustration. I guess OED may be obvious for people whose fields are close to linguistics or literature, but I am not one of them.
I didn't use acronyms until I saw people use them often because I thought people wouldn't understand my acronyms. Even I have been told what an acronym represents, I may forget it next time I see it.
I tend to forget words I don't see often, so forgetting acronyms is very rational.
@Mitch O.o Azeri is not at all close to Persian. They won't pick up any of our words unless we borrowed it from them. Kurdish is sooo weird to me, but I hear it's easy to pick up if you spend some time in, say, Kurdistan. Dari is much easier to comprehend.
@Mitch Although I'm fairly certain some Wikimedia images used to be censored all right, the wall wasn't built that far.
@Mitch Oh, you can? Whoops.
I'm also fairly certain some of the clergy men would really love to censor any site whose content they can't police. Darn puritans.
Which is kinda sad. Trying to find common ground with common folk and making stronger bonds with people is what they should be doing. The patronizing attitude doesn't help.
From the Washington Post (emphasis added):
The Belgian organization APOPO has been training its “heroRATS” to find land mines for 20 years, and it says the animals have helped clear more than 100,000 mines from former war zones.
From The Guardian:
In the past 20 years, Apopo’s [heroRATS...
@CaptainBohemian The reason I consider it obvious is that in my experience, it's a pretty commonplace abbreviation even among nonspecialists to my recollection. It's an abbreviation you might see on television shows like Jeopardy for instance. I'd be willing to bet that it's the most common abbreviation on the list by far, (although naturally P.I.E. would rank higher in an ngram due to false positives).
Naturally however, there is a first time everybody has to learn what an abbreviation means though and so many to memorize.
@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ Place one of these on your lap and maybe it'll start speaking in Proto Indo European to help you study, and while it's caught unaware you can prepare it for consumption:
@Tonepoet I don't watch TV often, and further, my native language is not English, so most of TV programs I have seen are not in English. In addition, I don't know what Proto-Indo-European abbreviated as P.I.E means.
@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ Yeah I get that. It's Turkish language which is pretty far. I think I heard (from you and @Færd?) that Azeri and Turkish are mutually intelligible.
@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ consulting web dictionaries can be free completely because there are always free public interneted computers; the easiness of accessing it depends on whether you hold a position in academia.
@Mitch the free computers in my alma mater are of very good quality. It's just that I have graduated and am not positioned there so that I can't access them easily.
I found a strange function of Facebook---once you ignore a person's message, you can unignore him by passing message to him and this is the only way to unignore him.
> The sight that makes me pinch myself Is Urals in the Spring: As if an overzealous elf Commanded by a king Or by the President himself Applied his magic skills And where the blizzard used to groan The goldfinch spreads his trills
I don't know how to say this. If my husband were an ELU enthusiast, he would probably mark a lot of simple stuff as unclear, too. Just as some things are too complex for some; some things are too simple for others. It works both ways... Just scroll; it's hard sometimes, I know.
Usually I'd prefer white text on black but whether it's because it depresses me after a while or something else I always can't resist changing back to light theme
@Cerberus Well, you know, text on white background can be dark blue or dark green or dark grey or a million other colors, but it's rarely ever that colorful on black
Of course, it shouldn't be all of those in a single document or a presentation
From the Washington Post (emphasis added):
The Belgian organization APOPO has been training its “heroRATS” to find land mines for 20 years, and it says the animals have helped clear more than 100,000 mines from former war zones.
From The Guardian:
In the past 20 years, Apopo’s [heroRATS...
Was the name of the assassinated President in Babylon 5 (Santiago) a reference to Chile's Salvador Allende?
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…