Ever have a word and you try to come up with it would mean if it was an acronym or initialism? I have found myself doing that quite a bit.
One time I found myself wandering the city of Boston, entering random CVS stores and asking the people working there if they knew what the initialism CVS stood for. No one knew. My favorite guess was “Cheap Viral Solution” which probably would be a better name for the current phenomenon of Temu.
And earlier time I did this was in college. In the earliest days of the web, when there were little examples of what one should put on one’s website, I came up with an idea for SPAM – The Society of Postmodern Archaeologists & Mailcarriers. While most definitely tongue in cheek, I actually did start to develop the idea of Postmodern Archaeology to be the scientific discipline focused on how one would interpret things we are creating today when viewed in the distant future. Basically, imagine digging up your own bones.
A real life scenario is the work that has been done to figure out a way to warn future generations of the presence of radioactive waste when we have no guarantee they will understand any current languages.
But alas, I wasn’t going to be entirely serious with my new idea. I built a humorous website for it instead: https://matte.elsbernd.net/words/spam/
(Btw, CVS actually stands for “Consumer Value Stores”, but prior to the web and Wikipedia, not sure I had any real way of finding that out.)
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