PETE HARRISON
ON SENSIBLE SLANG
Lost in capital letters - where's the GPS?

I VIVIDLY recall my sport diver training. The DO's words still ring in my ears: "OK, remove the DV, shout SOS and initiate AV. OK, doff the BCD, untangle the SMB from the SPG, pull him into the RIB and commence CPR. Chop chop, ASAP. The guy's got DCS. We don't want him DOA!"
Emitting a strangled croak, he toppled over the side. It seems his airway was obstructed by a rather sticky bunch of acronyms. As he climbed back on board, he said: "Is that clear?" As MUD, I thought.
Acronyms are the curse of the late 20th century. Offices hum with condensed speech: PC, VDU, AGM etc. Was my DO trying to tell me he works in an office?
Quite the opposite. He was saying: I may be Mr Normal, stuck in my Volvo on the M25, but at the weekend I'm part of an elite gang, one you can join only if you're cool enough to know the passwords.
All adventure sports have their jargon. Climbers inhabit a mystery world of snargs, sprags and fingery cruxes. Surfers relish fat lips, hollow pits and gruftlebuckets. But these idioms express concepts not previously served by English. Diving has a smokescreen for a language.
There is also a militaristic element at work here. Having sat armchair-bound all week, watching Arnie land, AK in hand, in the DZ, then set off the TNT to destroy the VX missile base, it feels good to get out at the weekend and squeeze off a few rounds of acronyms. You may not be strafing the gooks with your GPMG, but you can sling on the old ABLJ, suck hard on your DV and enjoy a few hours of R and R.
Enough of weasel-wording. Let's give simple, user-friendly slang words like reg and blob the credit they deserve, and kick spurious terms such as SPG and EPIRB into touch once and for all.

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Appeared in DIVER - July 1998

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