If this is a YART, let me know, as it seems like you all would have been down this road before, but I wanted to air a peeve of mine.

I hear people saying and writing "acronym" when they mean "abbreviation" so often it drives me mad.

Is the view of the wordies present that an acronym is itself a word, composed of the initial letters of a series of words (e.g. scuba = self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), and that an abbreviation is imply the initial letters, lined up and pronounced individually (e.g. PC = personal computer, and is not pronounced 'pik')?

/rant

As a side not to this, English seems to limit itself in terms of acronym formation more than other languages I'm familiar with. Spanish is great for taking as many letters from the front of a word as it needs to make a pronounceable acronym, where English almost always seems to only take the first letter.

As an example, PROFEPA stands for Procuraduría Federal de Protección Ambiental (a Mexican government agency - Attorney General for Environmental Protection). The acronym uses three letters of the first word, two letters of the second, and one from each of the last two, in order to be pronounceable in Spanish.

Perhaps this stems from the fact the English has so many different pronunciations of letters, based on what they're next to, combined with, etc., that English-speakers can always just take a go at pronouncing it, whereas Spanish has basically one sound for each letter. Dunno.