Regular readers of this blog know that I have clear contempt for snark and deliberate mistruths propagated by newspapers whose authors ought to know better.  The Wall Street Journal regularly fails to satisfy a basic smell test when a writer, for example, tries to convince that wireless carrier market concentration promotes competition, and no household could ever need triple digit (100+ megabits per second) transmission speeds.

             Being an equal opportunity curmudgeon, I want to take to task the New York Times for the lesser offense of pomposity.  It appears that this “newspaper of record” has an unconditional style book requirement that every acronym must explicitly represent a single word, in sequence.

             For example, before revising an article using an acronym for megabits per second, the Times dutifully used m.p.s. See https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/business/infrastructure-rural-broadband.html.  How precious.  Everyone else in the world uses the following Mbps or mbps.  See, e.g., https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/. 

            In a revision to the article, the Times now spells as megabits per second each time it is used rather than use m.p.s.

             The Wall Street Journal complies with the proper acronym, even as it wraps itself around empirical evidence and statistics that it infers as proving that “households are paying a premium for services they don’t need.”  Right on the acronym, but try telling a family of 4, each streaming video at the same time, that they could not possibly need platinum service.

             A pox on both their houses.