Nasa head of human spaceflight resigns days before 'historic' space mission

Re:Nasa head of human spaceflight resigns days before 'histo... by samizdis on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @09:18AM (#23246467)

It is an acronym, but it is rendered according to the house style of any given publication. The Guardian's style guide [1] says:

Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters (an initialism): BBC, CEO, US, VAT, etc; if it is an acronym (pronounced as a word) spell out with initial capital, eg Nasa, Nato, Unicef, unless it can be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as awol, laser and, more recently, asbo, pin number and sim card. Note that pdf and plc are lowercase.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a#...

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Re:Nasa head of human spaceflight resigns days before 'histo... by dylan604 on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @12:19PM (#23248677)

Do people in the UK spell out VAT or say Vat? I've heard it said both ways, but I'm on the other side of the pond where we use NASA not Nasa.

Maybe we should default to "What's it look like on the logo?" The NASA logo for one would look pretty dumb as Nasa.

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Re:Nasa head of human spaceflight resigns days before 'histo... by samizdis on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @12:51PM (#23249051)

We do it both ways in speech, so say either V-A-T or vat, but it seems always to be VAT in text, according to the style guides of every publication for which I've worked, or have read for (weird) interest.

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Re:Nasa head of human spaceflight resigns days before 'histo... by dylan604 on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @01:44PM (#23249661)

So, isn't that breaking their own style guide? That was kind of my point.

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