Lost in translation - Acronym Challenged

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Hello, I'm very new to this site. I read posts but often I have no idea what all these acronyms mean.

It would be really great if there was a sticky post where one could go to decipher them.

Example: who or what is an "NT" I keep reading about NT but who is that?

NT - ?
PDA - ?
AS - Aperger Syndrome got that one
ADHD - I got that one too.
CB something or other the list goes on forever.
But you get the idea, some of us just need some definitions.

NT = Neuro-Typical, an ordinary person, not afflicted with disorders of perception, mentation, or emotion.

PDA = (1) Public Display of Affection, anything from meaningful glances to full-body embraces performed in someplece other than the privacy of one's own home; (2) Personal Data Assistant, an iPad or similar device.

PDA also means a "disorder" where people willfully "avoid" responsibility. It's sort of a "made-up" disorder.

You can type "ADHD acronym" into a google search and usually find several explanations as to what it means. Pick the one closest to the context of the discussion.

It's quite disrespectful for some to just throw up an acronym and expect everyone to know it since an acronym could have several meanings unless it's common knowledge like FYI (For Your Information) or SAE (Self Addressed Envelope) which is used everywhere in society. People shouldn't have to goggle acronyms.

I agree completely, out of respect for others in my work reports I always follow the first time an acronym is used with the meaning for that very reason, an engineer will have a different meaning for same letters used than a medical professional will. Usually we can sort of decipher it based on subject matter but not always.

That NT thing really passed right over my head. I kind of figured out it meant non spectrum person but wasn't completely sure it might be slang for something else and I'm out of touch

Many Thanks - to those that are responding, please share more. For the acronym challenged like me.

I have trouble with acronyms unless or until I've "absorbed" them, meaning I've set their meaning into my head instead of having to figure them out. But until I get to that point, I literally have to pause in my thinking; acronyms have never seemed instinctual to me.

I've set in my mind now things like "ASD," and PTSD because I have it -- that's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But even that didn't come easy -- at first I got the letters mixed up and would call it "PSTD." I don't have dyslexia but I can get a moment of it when trying to read or use acronyms.

PDA is a different thing and only on this thread did I learn that it stands for Pathological Demand Avoidance. For some reason I look at those letters and can't form the words, so I'm sitting there puzzling over it.

I'm otherwise "good with words," very literate, but acronyms have always done my head in, for some reason. They make everything in my brain stop dead. Until I commit them to memory.

And sometimes the acronyms don't even stand for what you think they stand for.

In the earlier days of WoW (World of Warcraft) before the LFG (Looking For Group) system came out and people would advertise in chat for teams for various dungeons, they would usually shorten the dungeon name to its acronym (Wailing Caverns -> WC, Razorfen Krawl -> RFK, etc). However, there were two dungeons (Deadmines and Dire Maul) that would have been shortened to the same: DM. There was apparently enough confusion about this that people took to calling Dire Maul DM and Deadmines... VC (if you google "wow dungeon dm" you get a bunch of results about Dire Maul - with no Deadmines results at least on the first page - and if you google "wow dungeon vc" you get results for Deadmines). Why VC? Because the final fight in Deadmines had you fighting Edwin VanCleef, and so the users 'named' it after him. Counter intuitive, and if you're a new player you've got to either ask or google to figure out what people are talking about - even if you know that they're talking about a dungeon.

I had trouble with OMW for the longest time; my head would automatically translate it to 'Oh my word!' instead of 'On my way', which made quite a few online conversations quite a bit more amusing before my automatic translator caught up.

Back in the era when the Harry Potter books and films were still actively being written and made and released, going on any forum board for those was a nightmare to me, because everyone talked about "OOTP" and "POA". When I see just "OOTP" it doesn't make me think "Order of the Phoenix", it just makes my brain go "O....O?....toilet paper?" Even while I know I'm on a Harry Potter thread.

I just called everything stuff like "Order," (or "Phoenix"), "Azkaban," --- whatever one, single word most evoked the full title. It actually seemed faster and easier to me than acronyms.

I'm not really good with acronyms, either.

It took a few months even to know what LOL meant. LOL