Many years ago, before there was a Web, there was group text chat. The larger population didn’t pay much attention, but if you were a certain kind of computer nerd, chatrooms were essential.
In my first encounters with chatrooms, one acronym jumped out at me. I would see it over and over again, and I couldn’t figure out, from context, what it meant.
I’m speaking of STtNG. People in chatrooms would talk to each other about it with a sort of knowing insider’s knowledge.
Eventually I learned what it stood for. And that meant, I guess, that I had joined that elite club of insiders.
But meanwhile, time moved on. The acronym STtNG has long since fallen out of use, even among the elite of computer nerds. You can Google it of course, but the term is no longer common knowledge among the digerati.
So it seems that STtNG has journeyed through its effective lifecycle. I wonder how many other acronyms have gone through a similar journey.