In Conversation with Conlang
E Huckleberry
Welcome to the NCR! Did you ride in on the LRT? Or were you SOL?
Ah, the conlang of Ottawa. An acronym for anything and everything. Maybe it’s newspeak. Maybe it’s bureaucratic brainrot. But all your buddies in Club Fed are fluent. And if they aren’t, they’re so, so scared and confused. And you will be too.
Oh, you’ll hear the boomers complaining about LGBTTQQIPAA+ everywhere these days. “Oh, it’s so out of hand. All these buzzwords and acronyms. Things were different in the good old days when cars had benches, a can of pop was a nickel, and Orleans didn’t exist.” Well, you want to see real fear and uncertainty? Go ahead, take a look at Twitter, Reddit, AGHY, Yahoo Answers. You will find so many baffled drones buzzing to each other about the impenetrable vernacular (see that?) which infests the Fed.
First, they’ll do their little dance, swaying to and fro awkwardly trying to make eye contact. “What’s your classification?” one will buzz to the other. “I’m EC-03. You?” A complete absence of anything is felt. “Ah, I’m an AS-06”. May as well ask what Paul Allen’s card looks like. But of course, these sweet little drones don’t all work out of one hive. Oh no. Those classifications mean exactly nothing, because you could be doing something completely different in another department. These six-legged little fuzzy flower-smelling drones all work in highly specialized hives, with their own impenetrable language – so some poor schmuck from DND can be carping about the opacity of the acronym CHPCHC, and the guy from IA (Indian Affairs) INAC (Indian and Northern Affairs) DIAND (Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development) AANDC (Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada) INAC (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada) CIRNAC and/or ISC will be shaking his head ruefully, thinking, “boy, those Defence assholes really messed up with their acronyms. Anyways, better get started on that NARFA!”
Look, this probably sounds like insufferable bellyaching. I get it. Nobody needs another jaded Ottawa desk jockey sniffing and looking down their red noses at them, plucking at their HSBCFG (Heavily Straining Belts Constraining Fatcat Guts). So let me share with you some of the better ones I’ve seen in the last few months. I’m omitting the actual meaning to prevent being identified as the high level cog in the machine I am.
BRATS – Little bastards running around your department? Or just a delicious sausage cart that finally opened outside your office for like 6 weeks in the middle of summer?
FARF – The sound the little dog makes in that beloved Belgian comic with that one issue banned because of… you know. Also a group of radical Irish skateboarding IRA holdouts.
FAPGT – Some monthly challenge on reddit about how long you can go fapping to a picture of a GT snowracer (no model from after 1997 is allowed, they became much too smooth and curvy).
JAD – The kid who ruined the fraternity’s reputation. He just went 22nd overall in the last NHL draft.
OASIS – Mocked and underrated for so long that they’re slept on. Blur wishes. The Verve is right out.
YERH – The sound a patrolling mercenary makes when Arnie plunges a dagger into their hateful chest.
The best acronyms are of course the ones that are funny all on their own. Special shoutout to the Public Health Agency of Canada, which serves the noble purpose of having their acronym be the plausibly-deniable swear-word replacement we all desperately need. PHAC is just phoque for grown-ups, and we should all be grateful. Global Affairs Canada went with GAC, which I have definitely seen Batroc theLeaper exclaim when getting a smack from Captain America. Nothing’s better than an onomatopoeia, except for maybe the fact that GAC is still legally named DFATD, which of course was DFAIT before CIDA was merged into the department. Sorry, did I say better? I meant agonizingly boring. Let me save the paragraph with ASS (Administrative Support Specialist).
Alright, that was fun and all, but let’s actually go through a scenario you may face if you end up in the Federal Public Service: You’re on a government network, maybe on your VPN, you’re working on an RBAF, you need some information about the OPI. You’re new, you’re lost. That’s okay! That’s fine. The GOC has kindly set up a powerful tool that I had literally never heard of until I started typing this shit out, called TERMIUM Plus®. You can search any acronym and find… some of them. Even more frightening and baffling, there are options for Portuguese and Spanish. WHAT?! Oh, that’s right. This is Canada. You know what that means?
You know what they have there? OLA. Official Languages Act. So every one of those acronyms? Yeah, that’s fucking right. There’s a French version for every single acronym that exists in the GOC. Please contact your ADM to organize a learning plan for French in PSPM for your PMA. Good luck!
