ATM Abbreviations

["Bob Walker" <tac@i1.net>]

Welcome to English, the language whose main claim to user-friendliness is
that it has fewer irregular verbs and silent letters than French.  Other
than that, English is pretty much an ad hoc hodgepodge.  It doesn't help
that few native English speakers know the difference between "less" and
"fewer".  For instance, if you have less yogurt, you have fewer yogurt
molecules (either way, a desirable situation).  Fewer still grasp the
difference between "it's" ( a contraction meaning "it is") and "its" (a
possessive denoting "that which belongs to it").  Anyway, to answer your
question, here is an incomplete list of abbreviations you may encounter here
and elsewhere:
IMO:  In my opinion (frequently)
IMHO:  In my humble opinion (less frequently, usually with irony)
LOL:  Laughing out loud
FOFL:  Falling on floor laughing
BTW:  By the way
PS:  Post script (see what I mean? That's Latin for "after writing".  Then
you write some more, so the PS isn't really PS at all.  GF.)
GF:  Go figure  (usually meant metaphorically.  In this forum, can be meant
literally.)
TUE:  Turned-up edge (can happen on Tuesday, but not always)
TDE:  Turned-down edge  (a downer any day)
ROC:  Radius of curvature (if I remember my mythology, the ROC of a Roc egg
is about 120mm, but they don't polish well enough to be of any optical use)
TOT:  Tool on top
MOT:  Mirror on top
COC:  Center over center
RCH:  A very small distance; origin uncertain
And, no list would be complete without:
SNAFU:  Situation normal: all fouled up
FUBAR:  Fouled up beyond all recognition.

Finally, what you may have taken to be some bizarre punctuation the English
books didn't mention, like ;-)  and  8^)  are meant to represent smiling
faces.  Others may have the perenthesis facing the other way to denote a
frown.  You have to pick up your monitor and rotate it 90 degrees clockwise
to get the proper effect.  Just holding your head sideways doesn't do it.
I'm not sure what they're called, but let's see, now...your monitor screen
is made of glass, and glass is mostly quartz, a major ingredient in most
rocks, and these little pictures are written on the screen, so they must be
petroglyphs.

Hope this helps.