In my humble opinion....

...acronyms are stupid. I have never and will never type the letters LOL, unless perchance I am in the beginning stages of typing the word lollypop.



And, is it a coincidence that I have never watched Gossip Girl and this was their promo?
I think not.

Now, I don't hate all acronyms-just the ones that have been created because people are too lazy to write out entire words or want to imply the word fuck without saying the word fuck.

For example, I have fond memories of using acronyms for the birthday cards I made for my friends in the third grade that looked like this:

Super
Terrific
Excellent
Pretty
Happy
Awesome
Nice
Interesting
Extraordinary

And, how could I have made it through junior high yearbook signing without the three magic letters K.I.T?

And, there is no way I would remember all the colors in the spectrum without the handy ROYGBIV (Although, honestly, I've never had to rely on that knowlege too much in real life.)

And, now that I think about it, one acronym that has served me very well in the classroom is FANBOYS.

I know when we think of FANBOYS we think of this guy: The guy whose prized possession is his still-in-the-box Millenium Falcon. The guy you don't want to date because there's no way in hell you can compete with this:
But in English class it’s this very useful acronym:

For
And
Nor
But
Or
Yet
So

So, what's so useful about FANBOYS?

Well, you'll notice that and is one of the FANBOYS. Remember what the last post said about and:

We put a comma before and when it joins two sentences. For example,

Drew watched every episode of Star Trek, and he even knew how to speak Clingon.

And we don't put a comma when it doesn't have a complete sentence on both sides of it:

Drew watched every episode of StarTrek and learned Clingon.

Well, it's the same with the other six words. If one of the FANBOYS joins two sentences, we insert a comma before the FANBOYS, but if it doesn't have a complete sentence on either side, then we don't insert a comma. Here are a couple of examples:

Emma liked Drew a lot but decided to break up with him.

He was smart and cute, but it was just too weird that he called out the name Leia in bed.

He had even given Emma a snake armband for her birthday.

She could never bring herself to wear it, for she suffered from herpetophobia (the fear of reptiles, not herpes).