My vocabulary, like my wardrobe, is looking old and drabby these days. When I look in the mirror, I find someone looking back at me who is also old and drabby. (I need to get a new mirror!)

Clothes are expensive, and it is hard to change your face and body, but vocabulary can be fairly easily updated. So, when my sponsor responded to my daily report today with JKDTNRT (just keep doing the next right thing), I decided on a plan. I would come up with my own acronym to counterbalance his acronym. Immediately, the letters S.L.A.P. came to mind.

(I am tempted at this point to make a really bad pun (is there any other kind?), but . . . , oh well, why not!?  Here it is! My sponsor and I have a very acronymious relationship. If I have to explain this bad pun to you, you need to look up the word “acrimonious”. Of course, with puns—as with real jokes—if you have to explain them, they aren’t that good.)

So, S.L.A.P. stands for “Sounds like a plan!”  Then I thought to myself, well, before I claim originality, perhaps I should find out if someone has already copyrighted the phrase. The internet is a very sharp tool for puncturing the illusion of originality. My first hit was as follows:

“‘Sounds Like A Plan’ is the most common definition for SLAP on Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.”

Now, I am barely on Facebook. I recognize the other platforms as being involved with the internet somehow or another. However, despite my disappointment in finding out the S.L.A.P. was already a thing, I was strangely encouraged. After all, I had come up with something on my own that connected with modern ways of communicating.

There are some larger issues here, however. There is nothing wrong with acronyms, I suppose. We all use them at times. Who wants to watch television when you can just turn on the tv? I will admit that, when a student in a formal academic paper writes LOL, I do not laugh either out loud or to myself. In fact, I may deduct a point or two form that student’s score.

However, there may a more serious problem with our lust for acronyms. Is it possible that this tendency toward radical abbreviation is part of our tendency to value speed and ease over accuracy?

Take “my” acronym” for example. S.L.A.P. is nice because it is brief and actually spells a real word. However, what does this acronym say about the quality and nature of what I am saying? What if I’m planning to rob a bank or leave my wife? (I’m not doing either of those two things. I figured that I had better be clear about that before someone called the F.B.I. or my wife.)

S.L.A.G.P. does not spell a real word and doesn’t sound very nice either. However, the question that I need to ask myself early and often is this: Does this sound like a good plan? The truth is that plans can be good, or they can be many other things—bad, impractical, overly ambitious, self-centered, and a host of other not-so-good modifiers. In Jeremiah 29:11, we are told that God has good plans for Israel after their exile. But in Genesis 6:5, the Bible says that people’s hearts planned evil all the time. The same Hebrew word is used for “plans” in both of these Scriptures.

So, before I start slapping around a bunch of acronyms in the name of updating my vocabulary, I had probably better think about the accuracy of my words. Just because a word is clever or rolls off the tongue easily doesn’t make it the right word for the moment.