When I was in the US Air Force, we spoke in code – a coded language referred to as alphabet soup. Our lives were regulated by authorities and geared to established processes, all of which were a mouthful. The military solution was creation of terms that could be voiced as words in their own right, or made of letters spoken in sequence.
In written language, those combinations were distinguished as uppercase combinations, like someone was constantly yelling at you. Eventually some of the acronyms and abbreviations graduated to word-hood, and lower case.
Science, today, depends on the same kind of vocabulary. Interestingly, the new letter-words also can become stand-ins for Latin as the ancient language of science. Like scientific names, acronyms often cross languages and become part of the international fabric that distinguishes (nice), separates (arcane), and insulates (sad) science from street language.
As we move to necessary short-hand for communicating complex utterances, the jargon index soars and people in other fields become yet more suspicious that science is unintelligible. Field and lab science struggle to remain coherent while specialization constantly teases them apart. Worse yet, descriptive sciences and old-fashioned natural history seem to have more in common with the humanities, set apart from hard sciences that have become increasingly molecular and mathematical – fields so derived they communicate through symbols and complex nyms.
The following list is a concordance to current shorthand, attempting to maintain doors of communication between those people interested in understanding the scientific bases for understanding plants and those folk who continue to advance frontiers of discovery, leaving a breadcrumb trail of arcane letter combinations.
In an attempt to explain something about the purpose of organizations and programs, the following annotated list allows each organization to speak for itself if useful information is available. Mission and Vision statements, Objectives and Purposes, etc. are set in quotation marks when quoted directly from reliable sources. If no other source is cited, the statement was extracted from the organization’s own website. Links to those websites have not been included because there is often no predictable the landing point. All material was available on the web in 2018, unless otherwise noted.
A – at the beginning of our Alphabet
I – International and Institutional
L – giving lip with a Labellum
Link to this Page: https://botanyincontext.com/alphabet-soup-botanical-acronyms-abbreviations/