Is ACB an initialism or an acronym? Both!

An article by Bill Brown in the July 2017 issue of Toastmaster magazine discussed The ABCs of Toastmasters Acronyms. He decoded some of them:

ACB - Advanced Communicator Bronze
ACS - Advanced Communicator  Silver
ACG - Advanced Communicator Gold
ALB - Advanced Leader Bronze
ALS - Advanced Leader Silver

CC - Competent Communicator
CL - Competent Leader

DCP - Distinguished Club Program
DTM - Distinguished Toastmaster

VPE - (Club) Vice President Education
VPM - (Club) Vice President Membership
VPPR - (Club) Vice President Public Relations

But he left off the B’s, like BSS for Better Speaker Series. And when he talked about organizational structure he left off that there are 14 Regions above the 102 Districts. Also, he didn’t provide acronyms for the directors above clubs in the organizational structure - area directors, division directors, and district directors.  

If you look up acronym (as a noun) in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find two definitions. One is:

“A group of initial letters used as an abbreviation for a name or expression, each letter or part being pronounced separately; an initialism (such as ATM, TLS).

The other is:

“A word formed from the initial letters of other words or (occasionally) from the initial parts of syllables taken from other words, the whole being pronounced as a single word (such as NATO, RADA).”

If we ignore those occasional initial parts of syllables, then we can draw a Venn diagram including both definitions with three ovals (shown above) that resembles the simple masks worn by Zorro or the Lone Ranger.

Over at The Official Toastmasters International Group on LinkedIn Mike Raffety posted a link to his Toastmasters Vocabulary web page, which is like having a secret decoder for this alphabet soup. Mike’s page resolves how to avoid confusion between a division director (DivD) and a district director (DD). Relatively few of the acronyms he lists can be pronounced as words (although he left off BoD for Board of Directors):

AD - Area Director
COT - Club Officer Training
DOT - District Officer Training
GE - General Evaluator
PIP - Past International President
PRO - Public Relations Officer (of a District)

Also at The Official Toastmasters International Group on LinkedIn Sharon Horgan commented that the magazine article refers to acronyms, but they are actually initialisms. She referred to a Dictionary.com definition for initialism. But their definition for acronym also includes initialism.

The exalted rank of DTM (Distinguished Toast Master) breaks the rules for making an acronym. If we didn’t, we’d get DT, which is uncomfortably close to DTs (for delirium tremens).

Finally, how might we unofficially refer to those who haven’t yet finished the Competent Communication manual? Should they be known as Incompetent Communicators?