When I moved up from a home computer to a personal computer 15 years ago, I sought advice from its builder. I asked to be told what Dee Oh Ess was and was met with a patient, “Dos means Disk Operating System and that is...”. With the syllable DOS flying around, it took months to escape the thought of the doss houses I had encountered in the works of Dickens.

“Here’s your Pee Oh Dee,” flummoxed me, because what the courier chappie held out was a small pink slip which had nothing to do with peas. In time I understood that what was a receipt is now Proof Of Delivery. Progress will ensure that it is not pronounced as three separate letters but as “pod”.

If you have an Oh Dee (O.D.) account with a bank, you are entitled to draw more money than you have on deposit. This is not to be confused with Ell Aye Dee (LAD), which is a Loan Against Deposit. I suspect it will not be long before this too becomes an acronym: “A new fridge, Mamma? No problem, I’ll just get a lad from the bank.”

What is known as political correctness is firmly entrenched in the field of medicine. The not very nice sounding manic-depressive psychosis is now called Bipolar Syndrome. I remember being confused on seeing ‘STD’ in a hospital because I thought that Subscriber Trunk Dialling had a place only in the world of telephones. I still cannot see how “sexually transmitted” is better than “venereal”.

... contd.