There was a time when the powerful spoke Latin so that the people would understand nothing. Today we have progressed enormously: now they speak in abbreviated English.
Modernity has not brought flying cars or vacations on Mars, but it has brought something perhaps more disturbing: public documents that seem to be the result of hitting a keyboard with one's forehead. One opens a European report and finds phrases like: "The ESG framework must align with the SDGs through interoperable KPIs compatible with AI governance."
And there is the contemporary citizen, that poor tributary mammal, pretending to understand while searching on Google if ESG is a space agency, a tropical disease, or a new type of probiotic yogurt.
The Power's Alphabet Soup
Politics, science, and bureaucracy have stopped speaking human languages. They now express themselves in a technocratic alphabet soup that turns any discourse into a game of Scrabble organized by consultants with attention deficit disorder. One listens to a scientific conference and doesn't know if one is in front of a Nobel laureate or a broken robot trying to connect to the wifi.
The phenomenon deserves anthropological study. Because the acronym is no longer a useful linguistic tool. It is an ideology. A caste system. An intellectual peacock feather. A VIP pass to enter the club of those who know.
Today, having ideas is not enough. They must be compressed until they look like a diplomatic car license plate.
If you say "Key Performance Indicators," you are a tired civil servant. But if you say KPI, you immediately seem like a man who eats charts for breakfast at a Frankfurt airport, a successful yuppie with an air of modernity. If you talk about "environmental objectives," no one listens; but mention ESG and suddenly everyone nods gravely and admiringly, even though half the room secretly believes it's a Scandinavian hotel chain.
The acronym has replaced the argument. And it also has superpowers: the less comprehensible something is, the more important it seems. It is the official makeup of technocracy.
Because the modern technocrat feels the same contempt for clear language as a sommelier does for wine in a carton. Clarity seems vulgar to him. Even democratic. And that never brings anything good.
The contemporary expert does not want to be understood. He wants to be perceived as inevitable. That is why public reports are no longer written: they are assembled. They are a kind of verbal Frankenstein composed of English terms, circular graphs, and mutant acronyms that give the reader the sensation of having suffered a mild stroke.
A 2020 study published in the scientific journal eLife analyzed millions of academic articles and discovered something wonderful: acronyms have multiplied like hormonally-enhanced rabbits. Most appear less than ten times in all scientific literature. That is to say: someone invents an acronym, uses it for three afternoons, and then it disappears, leaving behind a linguistic corpse floating on the internet. Science now produces more abbreviations than verifiable knowledge.
The tribe of the initiated
Every laboratory wants its own acronym. Every committee needs its creature. European projects are no longer baptized: they are subjected to a casting and then ascend to administrative totems. Thus appear "HORIZON", "PROMETHEUS", "NEXTGEN", "EAGLE-XR", "GANDALF", or "SMART-BIO-XR", names carefully designed to sound like the future, innovation, and abundant budget. The criterion seems simple: if the citizen can understand it without help, they are not yet ready to receive European funding. In Brussels, the suspicion persists that a project called "Plan to fix something useful" would be rejected for lack of epicness and excess clarity. No one knows exactly what these programs do, but their logos convey an almost religious authority, and that, in certain administrative ecosystems, is already equivalent to half an impact assessment.
The acronym also fulfills a tribal function. In the Middle Ages, guilds had secret symbols. Today, academics use initials. Saying "PCR", "LLM", "RCT", "GenAI", "CRISPR", or "GDP" not only conveys information: it identifies the initiated. Language ceases to be a bridge and becomes a customs checkpoint.
The newcomer must quickly learn the jargon or perish socially. The intern listens to a conversation of the caste and feels that they have accidentally entered a meeting of Soviet spies.
-Did you already review the paper on LLM applied to RAG for NLP?
- Yes, but the API benchmark on GPU has ROI problems.
And there is the intern, smiling nervously while seriously considering abandoning science and opening a bakery.
It is no coincidence. Verbal complexity has always been an instrument of power. Before, the priest spoke Latin. Then the lawyer spoke in clauses. Now the technocrat uses English acronyms because abbreviated English has the perfect prestige: it sounds international, scientific, and opaque enough to intimidate… even if the meeting takes place in Cuenca.
Contemporary linguistic colonialism no longer arrives with flags or gunboats. It arrives with PowerPoint. And it demands that any idea immediately acquire an English name to truly exist. It is not enough to have a “plan,” you need a roadmap. It is not enough to coordinate, you must network. It is not enough for a meeting, you need a briefing. It is not enough for an absurd idea, it must be disruptive.
Spanish, apparently, is good for ordering coffee and arguing with family. But to manage the world, one must emit Anglo-Saxon corporate grunts.
Brussels speaks Baroque
European bureaucracy has elevated this to a form of baroque art. One reads certain institutional documents and suspects they were written by a depressed artificial intelligence after ingesting a consulting dictionary.
The contemporary bureaucratic phrase – whether Brussels or capital city – seems deliberately designed to prevent any human emotion: “Multilevel governance will facilitate the transversal implementation of interoperable resilient frameworks.” Translation into Spanish: “There will be more meetings.”
But perhaps the territory where the acronym reaches its most delirious form is political marketing. Because the modern politician no longer presents ideas: they launch brands.
Everything must sound like a space program. Parties announce strategies with muscular names and heroic acronyms: PERTE, NextGen, AI Act, NATO Readiness Initiative, Green Deal, Digital Services Act. Nothing says “we are improvising” with such elegance as a capital letter acronym.
The acronym has a formidable advantage: it allows one to feign precision where none exists. “Plan to improve things” sounds mediocre. But “Strategic Program for Territorial Ecosustainable Resilience” already sounds worthy of a seven billion budget.
And the more incomprehensible, the better. Because the citizen feels ashamed to ask.
The liturgy of the acronym
That is the true cultural triumph of the acronym: it has managed to make ignorance silent and shameful. No one interrupts a conference to ask what the hell ESG means. Everyone takes notes with a serious expression while internally experiencing the same confusion as a goat listening to quantum physics.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used to say that language also serves to establish social hierarchies. If he had lived to see LinkedIn, he would probably have sought asylum in a cave. Because the inflation of acronyms also responds to a deeply human and slightly pathetic psychological need: to seem important.
There is something adolescent about all this. Like when a group of friends invents secret codes to feel special. Only now ministers, scientists, and executives with multi-million dollar budgets are doing it.
The acronym functions like a verbal leather jacket. It makes the user feel sophisticated. Saying "generative artificial intelligence" requires effort. Saying "GenAI" allows you to immediately adopt the facial expression of someone who is listed on the Nasdaq.
Science is not innocent either. An article in Nature recently warned that scientific papers are becoming increasingly difficult to read due to the proliferation of jargon and abbreviations. That's not the surprising part. The surprising part is that anyone still manages to read them.
There are scientific articles that produce the physical sensation of trying to assemble Swedish furniture under the effects of anesthesia. And yet, we all pretend to be normal. Because admitting that we don't understand something has become socially dangerous. In a culture obsessed with intellectual hypercompetition, no one wants to be the first to raise their hand and ask:
-Excuse me, what exactly does IoT-enabled ESG-driven AI governance framework mean?
That would be equivalent to confessing illiteracy today. So we nod with liturgical gravity and preemptive enthusiasm, that cervical gymnastics with which humans disguise their bewilderment. We always nod.
The great contemporary comedy consists of millions of people pretending to understand acronyms that millions of others don't fully understand either. It is possible, in fact, that Western civilization is being governed by individuals who have spent fifteen years pretending to know what the same hieroglyphs mean.
Perhaps the acronym is that: a bureaucratic religion.
It has its priests, its initiates, its liturgical formulas, and its sacred language. It produces immediate obedience and discourages uncomfortable questions. A citizen can discuss an argument; discussing an acronym is much more difficult. How to confront something called ESM, CBDC, or GDPR without seeming like a savage fresh out of the woods?
The abbreviation is intimidating. And therein lies its power, because the problem is not linguistic, it is democratic.
When public language becomes incomprehensible, public conversation becomes impossible. And when citizens need a dictionary, a master's degree, and psychiatric help to understand an institutional statement, something begins to smell faintly of a decadent empire. The Enlightenment dreamed of expanding knowledge. We have compressed it to the point of illegibility. Perhaps in centuries archaeologists will discover our reports and conclude that Europe was governed by faulty printers... and perhaps they won't be wrong.
Meanwhile, the citizen will remain there, sitting in front of a 240-page PDF, trying to decipher whether the new interoperable framework for resilient governance means something relevant or simply that there will be another Zoom meeting. In English, of course. Because today, if you don't use an acronym, you practically don't exist. And if you use too many, you can already run the planet.
Anyway, I bid farewell because I must attend a High-Level Multistakeholder Strategic Framework Meeting for Cross-Border Governance and Sustainable Innovation Alignment. Or, in plain English: "I have another useless meeting that could have been an email."