My theory is that three-letter acronyms are so popular because they are strike a balance between length and ambiguity. I.e. two-letter acronyms are too ambiguous, but four-letter acronyms are too long for the uniqueness benefit.

Most of the remaining ambiguity of three-letter acronyms could be avoided if people didn't get upset about redundant acronym expansion: "I cleaned with IPA alcohol after having an IPA ale."

[1] RAS syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

Most people don't care about RAS syndrome, except semi-intelligent people who think grasping at (incorrect) pedantry proves they are smart.

Depends on the acronym for me.

ATM Machine grates on my sensibilities, since we all know what an ATM is and calling it a "machine" is both redundant and low-information. It's like calling an ATV an ATV vehicle (which I have never heard): would you call a truck a truck vehicle?

PIN number on the other hand, I'm fine with. A pin is a small piece of steel used in sewing, a PIN number is a number you type into an ATM.

I think people stop parsing ATM as an acronym and start parsing it as just the name of a thing. Which is understandable. When I see ATM I dont think ... I just realized I forgot what the A and T stand for. Apparently automated teller? Perfect example I guess. As far as I'm concerned, ATM is just the name of the thing. And I parse it as such, so ATM machine isn't redundant since ATM doesnt point to "automated teller machine" in my mind. It just points to "ATM."

I also find misuses of RAS syndrome fun. AAV vector isn't RAS syndrome. It stands for adeno associated virus vector. But people are eager to jump on whatever pedantry they think they can find, makes them feel smart I guess.

I don't know that it's even RAS syndrome.

Some machines have 'machine' in their name, most don't. A milling machine, yes, but who says lathe machine?

ATM machine just sounds weird to me. The fact that the "M" stands for machine doesn't help but it's not decisive.

That's what I mean by redundant: it's like saying spoon utensil.

But for me ATM is like milling, it's a machine that has machine in its name. It's not like lathe, probably because I've grown up surrounded by people that call it an atm machine. You cant fight language after a point - there's a point where double negatives are grammatically incorrect, and there's a point where we are at now where wikipedia just classifies some dialects of english as having negative concord, where multiple negatives affirm (instead of contradict) eachother. Same way, at a point it probably makes more sense to talk about redundant acronyms as just a thing english does than try and say that a construction that a lot of people use and that everyone can understand is a grammatically incorrect thing. So ATM vs ATM machine becomes a dialect choice rather than some grammatical discussion, like British vs English spelling

That's a bunch of BS shit! ;)

Wait until you hear about International Phonetic Alphabet.

We need to expand the TLA space.

The only options I can think of are increasIng the number of letters and redefining “T” to “tetra” or even “thirty”.

Time to get started on a new RFC

ETLAs got you covered:

https://wiki.c2.com/?ExtendedThreeLetterAcronym

Although I'd like to see something like XTLAs, for eXtensible Three Letter Acronyms.

You can never have too many The Last Airbender spinoffs.

I guess I'm still not getting TLA, since my Temporal Logic of Actions model says there should only be 17 valid spinoff states.

Have you checked out the Unicode character repertoire recently? There are a lot more than 26 letters to play with.

We have to restrict outprselves to phonetic alphabets, abjads, and abugidas else they can’t truly be “acronyms”

Perhaps consider a FLAX?

Four letter acronym, experimental.

That will only work until the RFC is approved, at which time the X will be dropped.

IPA the parent refers to is the "India Pale Ale", a categorization of Beer used in the UK.

It’s used quite frequently in the US too - especially by those with beards in flannel shirts.