Should we discourage the use of argot such as AmE, BrE, ELU, ...?

Question

^{[With Addendum]}

Should we discourage the use of argot such as AmE and BrE—even ELU—[added:] in answers to nonspecialists' questions at ELU?

Most visitors who find answers here come from a browser search and have no idea what AmE or BrE mean, nor should they be expected to guess.

Insider abbreviations encrypt the information that we hopefully provide to a more general audience.

Is it too much trouble to spell out “American English” and “British English”?

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Background:

• Some answers to nontechnical questions use technical abbreviations such as AmE and BrE (recent example, where the question does not use the term AmE yet the answer uses both AmE and American English without indicating that they are the same)

• With a deep interest in language, I already understood the meaning of AmE

• As a technical editor, I imagined a less-ensconced perspective that seems more usual among questioners at ELU

• [No longer completely true:] Found unrelated answers at ELU and its Help Center for “what is AmE” or just “AmE” (with or without capitals, as with the searches below)

• [Now true:] Found a useful answer at Is there a difference between British English phrases and American phrases? by searching ELU for “what is AmE” and noticing that the match's listing included “... American English (AmE) ...”

• Found nonanswers at onelook.com, some answers at specific dictionary sites

• Wikipedia redirects “AmE” to “American English,” which doesn't mention AmE per se

• Found a barrage of extraneous matches in web searches for “AmE” and “AmE English” that overshadowed a match with a terse definition

• A web search for “AmE English language” at last led to some useful web pages, though only one of many that I viewed both has “AmE” in its title and actually spells out AmE in its content

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Addendum

Good answers and references!

Guess I'll sporadically add specific comments to ELU answers that might overmatch their questions technically. See how that goes. Wanted to pose the question here first.

Probably not news but just for the record, the standard in technical writing is to introduce an abbreviation parenthetically or as a link when there is any doubt that a reader will understand it precisely and readily. (I often encourage an author to present a concise table of terms early in their article.)

Answer 1

ELU is for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts -- in other words, specialists. Specialists have their own jargon, and they use it routinely to communicate clearly and succinctly with one another.

Among ELU users, you are likely to see jargon that includes abbreviations such as AmE and BrE.

Rather than asking these specialists to abandon the very way they communicate, it makes more sense to me to make sure the site helps anyone who is not familiar by documenting common jargon, including abbreviations, in the online help.

A good way you could assist with this is to look through the existing online help and see if there are any glaring omissions.

See for example: List of common abbreviations and acronyms (NOAD, ESL, PIE...)

Answer 2

(Don't know what this adds to @MetaEd's excellent answer, but here goes.)

I really don't think this is a problem (at least it's never been raised in meta before.)

Some background might help to understand the pushback*, the downvotes, and the range of opinion.

For years, EL&U has been struggling to be a site for "for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts", but one look at the front page will tell you just how far below that goal the site really is. Not only is this not treated as an serious site, but it is a daily struggle even to enforce/encourage the use of a dictionary, putting questions in context, citing sources, etc., something necessary to maintain a minimum level of quality for questions and answers. It's been difficult, and there's a lot of meta discussion about it.

Your proposal strikes me as one more step in accommodating those who can't be bothered to look things up, which is a bit of a hot button here.

Related:

This is not a site for “serious English language enthusiasts,” and it never will be
Proposal: Add a “too basic”/“uninteresting” off-topic option
Does ELU Have Worse Questions Than Other Sites?
General Reference = general clairvoyance?
Basic questions are not so basic
Extraordinary spike in low-quality questions by 1 rep users
Basic questions are not so basic
Should we have a migration path to ELL?
“Thanks man for not laughing at my question :)”
Word for disrespecting eldest half-sister by referring to her husband as girly-girl-manly-boy though he's amused but the rest of the family isn't?

Etc., etc.

*_{I apologize to the community, and especially to the OP, for my belligerent comment (now deleted). It's not elevating to the community, and it was a terrible way to welcome a new user to meta. Unfortunately, I have no excuse for it. I hadn't even had a bad day.}

Answer 3

I agree: we should use as few abbreviations as possible. Not only are they generally not as nice to look at as full words, but they are often incomprehensible to those unaccustomed to our website, or at least they slow down their reading.

It is the task of a writer to burden his readers with as little work as possible; if you, as a writer, spend the extra three seconds it takes to type out British English once, you may save a thousand readers the thirty seconds it would take them to look up BrEng. Your 'return on investment' would be ~100,000% in this case. And more than a thousand people may read your answer...

I believe this is common advice to be found in most serious style guides. We are here not just to answer questions, but also to set the example. What will people think when we give them advice about how to write while at the same time needlessly using abbreviations?

The same applies to needless jargon; but jargon is more often necessary, and it doesn't have the ugliness that abbreviations have.

Abbreviations can be justified in chat, where speed is an issue. In ordinary writing, though, you can just say "the site" if you have already mentioned English Language and Usage, or "this variant" if the reader knows you are talking about Indian English. The fact that Oxford English Dictionary is too long is not really an excuse.

In physical print, space is sometimes an issue, such as in dictionaries. Then abbreviations can be justified as well, despite the extra work they burden the reader with.

Here is a quotation from our esteemed moderator Nohat:

Shame on anyone for using any of these abbreviations (NOAD, OED, PIE) without defining them or least linking them.

Answer 4

Yes, absolutely. These shorthands are counter-productive.

The tiny amount of typing time it saves one person is much less than the incredible amount of time it wastes for many, many readers and also for robots, who represent readers who are typing “American English” into a search engine. At least some of those readers are learning English.

Even for readers who are familiar with the shorthands, when we read them, we have to decode them before we understand them. You can put electrodes on a person’s head and see the dramatic difference in brain activity between just reading “American English” or decoding “AmEng.”

The whole point of writing is to be read and understood, not to be cryptic or save typing time. Especially on StackExchange, you are writing for the community, not for yourself.

If you want to save typing time, go into your operating system settings and make a text substitution: “AmEng ➡ American English” so that when you type “AmEng” the computer types “American English.” It is 2016, not 1955.

This applies also to acronyms. They are obsolete when writing for the world unless you expand them at least once on every page because there is the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and also the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) and if you say you learned to make a flambé at the CIA you will be misunderstood again and again and again.