A recipe for the correct use of acronyms

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 01, 2018
A recipe for the correct use of acronyms

Re: “There’s nothing wrong with having a bonk between the sheets”, Have Your Say, yesterday.

With due respect to Ye Olde Pedant, I don’t mean to lecture the Pope about Creation. But you don’t have to repeat over and over the phrase  “engage in sexual intercourse [with]” in your sentence. You could have written, “... where men engage in sexual intercourse with women, men with men, women with women, and some with both”. That would surely have sounded more mature than “bonk”, especially for a 31-year international-school English teacher. I’m not sure if I would want to send my kids, or any kids for that matter, to you for English lessons. 
Now let’s go back to your letter of July 17 (“Let’s hear it for the PONTSOs”). You said you have a problem with the acronym LGBTQ because you can’t pronounce it. Well, my Oxford Dictionary informs me that an “acronym is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word”, eg NASA, SEAL, RADAR, SCUBA, SNAFU, as opposed to NAACP, FBI, RSVP, LGBT, which are unpronounceable and called initialisms, not acronyms. 
Anyway, it’s lunchtime and I’m going to make myself an LGBT sandwich with lots of mayonnaise.
Yours pedantically,
Somsak Pola
Samut Prakan