Acronyms Backronyms FML

Today was polling day for the council elections here in sunny Glasgow. Sadly, I didn't get to vote even though I visited two separate polling stations (or Polling Places, as they called themselves). Seems that Glasgow doesn't know I'm here since no one had me down on their list of voters.
As I walked away, I thought about how the SNP would rue the day they missed out on adding me to their supporters. Then I got to thinking about the name SNP and why so many political parties' names are acronyms: SNP, SSP, SWP. I supposed that this was all thanks to two kinds of union. Firstly the British workers unions of the twentieth century. These bodies outdid each other to see who could have the longest name (as in the banner above) and spaned thousands of acronyms. Secondly the Soviet Union. The reds loved nothing more than to wake up in the morning and think of a new government body they could endow with an incredibly long name. My guess was that when the British political left was establishing today's SNP or SSP  it was infatuated with both these unions and decided that it too was going to replace words with strings of capitalised letters.
'Bah, fuck the chattering borgeouis classes and their cushy words. We'll stare reality in the face without any of the comfort of surface meaning to hide behind. Long bunches of consonants it is lads!' they would cry.
Granted, the Scottish Nationalists are an older party than Labour (and for all I know the Conservatives too) but I stand by my point. One thing backing up this baseless belief is the fact that the word acronym was only coined in the twentieth century (acro- meaning first + -onym) and so the drive to capitalise seems to spring from somewhere in that century.
I don't have anything against political parties whose names are acronyms. Quite the opposite. But I did decide that since they were such prominent examples of acronym users they should shoulder some of the blame for the hell of the modern business environment.
At work today I was told we were going to be having a new GPS and that this would affect my job significantly. I'll take your word for it, I thought, since I've got no idea what that means. I also have little idea what my PMS is, or what the CEF ranking system we use signifies, the ITSOS compliance sheet is a mystery, I don't know what a BACS payment is, or even exactly what they conference I went to last week was about. I knew it was an IATEFL conference, I just never got to the bottom of what that means.
Then of course there's LOL, FML and co. But they're o.k. as at least people don't shout them at me at work and expect me to do something about it.
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. I do not believe that we will end up in a meaningless world of letters that stand for words people have long ago forgotten. The backronym will save us from this. The backronym is a stupendously silly phenomenon where someone knows what they want their acronym to spell out and works their way backwards from there to deciding the words that will be used. There was an example of something that was almost a backronym in the papers today: JUICE. It is the name of the new EU space exploration program to Jupiter and stands for JUpiter ICy Moon Explorer. Of course, it should really be called JIME, but JUICE is clearly better so they went for that.

I believe the future lies that way. These scientists' craving for JUICE rather than the meaningless JIME is symptomatic of the drive that will bring us back from the brink. People will respond to their inate need for meaning by trying harder and harder to think of acronyms that spell out a meaningful word. The results may be ridiculous in the short term and we will no doubt end up asking for a bag of Carbohydrate Heated In Pig Starch (chips). Eventually though we will be able to forget what the letters stand for and just return to the good old words they spell.