Thursday, September 8, 2016

Why using FOPS as an acronym for Fear of Public Speaking is a lousy idea






















At the Huffington Post (for Australia) on August 31st Libby-Jane Charleston had an article titled How Fear of Public Speaking Can Hold Back Your Career and subtitled It’s known as FOPS and it’s everywhere.

Arrgh! Why do we need another meaning for an  acronym that has widespread use in engineering? FOPS already means Falling Object Protective Structures.

They are discussed in an international standard, ISO 3449: Earth-moving machinery -- Falling-object protective structures -- Laboratory tests and performance requirements. SAE International has another standard, J1119_197609 about Steel Products for Rollover Protective Structures (ROPS) and Falling Object Protective Structures (FOPS). There also were two SAE performance standards: SAE J231_199903 on Minimum Performance Criteria for Falling Object Protective Structure (FOPS) and J1043_199903 on Performance Criteria for Falling Object Protective Structure (FOPS) for Industrial Machines - both of which were canceled back in March 1999.   

What would be better than FOPS? How about the venerable old 1909 term speech fright?

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