Initials are ok. They exist as a courtesy, a device to shorten the conversation which is odd. I have never heard anyone say that we should talk less. A website, Medilexicon.com bills itself as "A dictionary of over 200,000 medical, pharmaceutical, biomedical & healthcare acronyms and abbreviations." 200,000? By the time you commit all of them to memory your professional career would be practically over and you could move to Florida and play golf.
Initials can be confusing. I recently purchased a plane ticket for my wife. She wanted to leave from Orlando International Airport, locally called O.I.A. but known everywhere else as MCO. Apparently, the land used by the airport was once McCoy Air Force Base until it changed names in 1981. That was over two decades ago! Are tourists confused enough to think that they are going to spend their family vacation at a military air station? She wanted to fly to Nashville International Airport a facility whose initials are, you guessed it, BNA or Berry Field Nashville.
Some initials are popular yet no less mysterious. Most everyone is familiar with the equation E=MC2. Albert Einstein is hailed as a genius for this simple formula. "E" stands for "energy", ok, so far I get it. "M" stands for "mass", alright. Now here is where it gets confusing, "C2" represents the speed of light squared. According to dogmatic physicists, nothing can travel faster than light (FTL) so our explanation should end there (or, be DOA) but it goes on a bit. Essentially, Einstein is saying that matter and energy are the same thing so, in my non-scientific viewpoint, it should be M&E = Mr. & Mrs., or "Matter and Energy, it's an institute you can't disparage." If the two are divorced the results are anti-matter in which most of the material possessions of the Mr. vanish into a black hole and much energy is spent on hair implants and a new Corvette in a vain attempt to make the now listless collection of negatively charged protons happier.
American states have reasonable initials but their order leaves something to be desired. When I was a child I lived in Fla. Then I moved to Tenn. Now I live in FL. By this point I have forgotten how to spell the name of my state because I abbreviate so much. When making a list of states part of me wants to place Iowa before Idaho, however, the proper arrangement is ID before IA. In the same fashion, I want to put MA before ME and MD before them both so that MS can go after MO which would make NV happier. Then VT could go before VA and WI before WV.
If you open a book on religion you might see a reference for "Jno." which stands for "The Gospel of John." No one is quite sure how "Jno." came to represent John. One theory is that it was an abbreviation for the Latin word "Johannes." Instead of writing the long cognomen scribes in the Middle Ages wrote "Jno." Therefore, it became a tradition, a time saver, although it requires the same amount of effort. Why are there no books of "Mwt, Mkr., and Lek.?" I don't know; but after I R.I.P. I will ask JC.
Politics in the USA is divided between two political parties which rely heavily on the power of initials. The DNC is a conglomeration of the NAACP, AFL-CIO, and the ACLU. The RNC, aka the GOP, has the NRA, those who sit on the board of the FDIC, the AARP (whose members are happy if their S.S. payments arrive on time from the P.O.), FNC, and everyone in the DoD who has their IRA maxed out. It is getting more and more difficult to distinguish between the parties because both are in love with the funds they get freely through the IRS which makes us taxpayers POWs.
Pointlessly repetitive initials always get my goat. I cringe when I hear someone say "put your PIN number in the ATM machine." I must ask, "what is a 'Personal Identification Number number' and what is an 'Automatic Teller Machine machine?'" Why do things that are designed to save time invariably spend more of it? I ask a lot questions, but then again, I have ADD which came from watching too much TV.