Ok, my point was overstated. I just was struck by the novel (to me) mechanics of forming an abbreviation by listing the number of omitted letters. It seems so arbitrary. The number itself doesn't convey any information. It just seems odd. I know every specialized field needs its own technical vocabulary, and nobody likes to type. The IT field is full of clever or punning acronyms like TWAIN (which may or may not stand for "technology without an interesting name"), pronounceable (GUI, BASIC, DOS, WYSIWYG), self-referential ("TLA" = three-letter acronym) or even recursive ,like GNU ("GNU's not UNIX"). "Unix" itself was originally a geek pun on "Multics". Seems like someone could have done better for L10n and i18n. No matter, if people know what it means. "IT" stands for "ivory Tower", right? (kidding!)
Auto-correction is very handy for pranks. Years ago, we configured a colleague's copy of MS Word, so that when he wrote his name formally (e.g "Jonathan, Q. Smith, P.E.") MS Word would auto-"correct" it to
"Jonathan, Q. ("I'm not wearing any pants") Smith, P.E.".
It took about a week for him to trigger it and he was absolutely dumfounded.
