Acronyms

Today was a day full of looking up information on the DAHP web portal, and it got me to thinking about the randomness of rules for how people end up pronouncing acronyms. That one up there is the Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, or “dap”. It’s the state agency that oversees our company’s work though in most other states it would be a SHPO, or State Historic Preservation Office. That’s pronounced “ship-oh”. I’m not sure why Washington is special, we just are.

Of course, there’s also the SHPO the State Historic Preservation Officer who’s the person in charge of that department. Back when I was in Oregon, you’d get it casually in both contexts. “I’m going to go drive down to ship-oh” or “You need to talk to the ship-oh”.

Where it gets funky is when you get to THPOs–Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (no office, just an officer attached to a tribe). That’s pronounced “tip-oh”, not “thip-oh.” Who knows why. Lazy tongues, I suppose. Unrelated to archaeology, I remember back in Oregon, we always had ODOT, “oh-dot”, and when I moved to Washington I had a brief period of being kind of like “Um…double-u-dot?” Their trucks say WSDOT, which I soon learned was “wash-dot”. Go figure.

Today, I discovered a form that had been filled out by the equivalent of “Jane Doe, WASHPO”. (I also discovered one authored by the equivalent of “J. ‘Buck’ Doe”. Really? An official form filed with the state, Buck?) WASHPO gave me plenty of lols. How would you pronounce that? “wash-poh?”

That’s just silly!