Talk:alphabet soup

RFV discussion: January 2021

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

alphabet soup

Sense 3: "A circle of people or organization perceived as systematically obfuscating the nature of its influence and befuddling concepts by subverting language, such as employees of an alphabet agency or progressive sectarians wokescolding chats." Equinox ◑ 05:56, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

That sound you just heard is a helpless English sentence swept away by verbal sludge and house-sized boulders to its death. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:35, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

@Equinox, Chuck Entz: I agree this definition is a sludge. Before adding I checked and indeed “alphabet soup” (as also mentioned by WP) itself is widely used (not only on chans but also journalistic pieces) for “federal agents” (but probably this is US usage), aka fedposters, alphabet boys which Equinox just added, possibly comparing his knowledge of similar use of alphabet soup then but not understanding what I meant with the definition, which is indeed as vague as the definition outside the dictionary: I also think it sometimes refers to LGBTQIA+ vel sim. but those who use it do not necessarily distinguish, as anal liberalism is also CIA. So I tried to give a definition of the vague kind of people nobody has seen (hopefully) that are referenced by the term (instead of dumping some synonyms). But it seems likely to me that when the word occurs durably in books it can as well be read as “employees of an alphabet agency”, instead of just the narrow linguistic sense, so examples of that would just suffice. You may of course completely reword the definition. Fay Freak (talk) 11:23, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Cited – in some sense, you see, it is clear it means some vague organizational reference, not just “overabundance of acronyms“ itself, so you see why I judged our definitions were lacking much, how ever the missing sense would be defined. You can find more searching "alphabet soup" + government for example. Fay Freak (talk) 11:59, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

RFV-resolved. Definition changed to be clearer and to match the cites provided. Kiwima (talk) 17:37, 24 January 2021 (UTC)