August 17th, 2025

The world is littered with abbreviations, mnemonics and acronyms.  We use them to save time and energy repeating ourselves, shorten text messages for our lazy thumbs, remember key points and to establish a clear barrier between those ‘in the know’ and the rest of the world.  All this talk of what the DO said to the TO about the skills in SO1, and whether the CBL RBs and subsequent CCs were at the correct rate can leave a new member in the branch feeling like they have landed on another planet.  I once joined my very first team meeting in a college where I was doing some teaching that consisted of impenetrable discussions following these lines.  After 3 minutes I was bewildered and after 20 minutes I was starting to giggle and play abbreviation bingo in my planner.  But in reality such an experience can be off-putting at best and downright discouraging at worst.

So here’s a challenge: Have a look at your club notice board, website or newsletter.  Is it littered with acronyms that us British Sub Aqua Club members, the cognoscenti use with impunity?  Put yourself in the eyes of a new prospective member.  Would they be able to comprehend 75%, 80%, 95% of the information that you are presenting if they didn’t know what special code words you were using?  Some websites and newsletters avoid this pitfall, but others, put together by well-meaning and time-poor volunteers fall headlong into creating a barrier to others, right at the point where we should be welcoming and helping them into our world.

Sadly this problem is not limited to written materials.  Listen to an OWI or AI (or maybe still a CI) running a OW session and there will be a litany of BCDs, SEEDS, REAPs and ASs perhaps with some ppO2 and an MOD thrown in for good measure.  And as if this wasn’t enough to send you into a tailspin the instructors themselves will get hung up on memories of times past and terminologies encountered, so that terms such as DV, reg and 2nd Stage are bandied around interchangeably.  And confess now, who still refers to AAS in the occasional lapse?  And CPR instead of BLS?  We’ve all done it, haven’t we?

Of course, I am not arguing that we should abandon all abbreviations.  Anyone who has tried to draw up a dive planning sheet on the computer will be aware that there’s only so much space on an A4 page and you can only make the font so small or no one else will be able to read it.  The actual size of the font will of course need increasing as the age of the divers in your branch increases.  This usually corresponds the apparent shortening of one’s arms so that your dive computer display can’t quite be forced into focus, and leads shortly thereafter to the purchase of a dive computer with a larger screen or colour LED higher contrast screen.  This strategy is of course just buying time and bifocal lenses are looming on the horizon.  So in order to stave off the hideous reality, we can happily abbreviate to fit the information into the print out so that our dive plan doesn’t cover an intimidating number of printed pages.

In some cases though abbreviations can be an even bigger lifesaver.  Take the role of DM.  We all know it stands for Dive Marshall or is it Dive Manager?  Nevermind, I can safely hide behing the DM term without struggling to remember.  The Diving Officer’s Conference abbreviated to DOC saved us from misplaced apostrophes, and two years ago we changed the name to the Dive Conference.  But without fail the feedback every year includes reference to the DOC.  You can take an instructor to the bar but you can’t make him drink….oh well obviously you can’t stop some of them..but you know what I mean!

So  I’m setting a challenge to my own teaching and my instructor team to avoid the over excessive use of acronyms, especially with prospective new members and new trainees.  Perhaps I will introduce a glossary of terms list on the classroom wall?  Maybe I will award a wooden spoon style prize for the biggest transgressor?  Maybe I’ll start a diving abbreviations lookup website, like the ones that I use to help me decipher text messages occasionally?  As I was discussing the other day with the NDO and several NIs from the DTG and ITG at the NDC meeting at BSAC HQ, the first step to solving the problem is to recognise it exists…