> Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters (an initialism): BBC, CEO, US, VAT, etc; if it is an acronym (pronounced as a word) spell out with initial capital, eg Nasa, Nato, Unicef, unless it can be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as awol, laser and, more recently, asbo, pin number and sim card. Note that pdf and plc are lowercase.
The operative phrase there is "considered to have entered the language as an everyday word". The acronym "PIN" has morphed into the term "pin number" meaning "A personally-identifying number usually associated with financial transactions".
Yes, it's redundant, but the point is that it's not being used as an acronym, but as a separate part of the lexicon with its own meaning.
I've never heard of that way of handling acronyms before.
The site is WIRED UK. Maybe it's a UK thing?
My first reaction was, "That's not how you write NASA; This author/editor is an idiot. How can I trust anything they've written here?" I doubt that's the reaction they want.
Now I just feel sorry for the author whose writing is forced to look weird to many readers.
Over time, maybe people will just come to recognize it as "a British thing" just like they recognize aluminium as the British spelling.
Aluminium/aluminum is less British/American than you might think. Humphry Davy initially called it alumium, then aluminum, then it was decided by others to call it aluminium, which became the dominant spelling (which it still is, internationally).
Then, just to confuse matters, Charles Martin Hall promotes it as aluminum on his marketing posters, but himself calls it aluminium on his technical documents, so some people think that the predominance of aluminum in North America may just be down to a typo.
edit - Looking at the New York Times, I notice that while they write 'NASA' and 'NATO', they also tend to write 'Unicef' and 'Norad'. I wonder if they have a four letters or less capitalisation rule for acronyms.
Does "NASA" actually look weird to anybody? That's how NASA themselves write it... so do you Brits think that everything NASA publishes with their name on it looks weird?
I say defer to however the organization in question writes it. That should surely lead to the least confusion and weirdness. It would certainly help UK news organizations with consistency:
In logos I agree but in normal writing it always looks like unwanted emphasis too me.
I think there's a cultural difference here, USAian papers kept up the many founts with underlining, etc thing long after it had become unfashionable in the UK.
The norm is the norm - whatever you're used to.
...which is what my previous post was supposed to highlighting. Somebody took it personally :-(
CERN is an acronym and BBC is only an initialism. There is a linguistic trend to using title-case for acronyms; particularly companies seem to be turning their acronyms in to the company name. Perhaps using "Cern" is simply following that trend.
