Originally Posted by
chimambu
You saved me googling this. Not everyone lives in the UK or even Portsmouth to know the little island of Man. It is one of the joys of FT lurking to see the snobbery of "acronysm". Some places like AMS and LGW are logical and LHR is known from long usage but you have to be a student of history to know that flying to PEK will take you to Beijing (where I am right now) or BOM will take you anywhere. Why should ABV be Abuja? What has EZE or YYT got to do with anything?
You get to pick up some of the terms (with your pocket googler) with time and then you are full of glee as you write and use terms like YYT. You say to yourself -"let them SUFFER" to the newbies. Evidence that you have arrived until another person mentions ITM or KIX or TXL and you are flummoxed again
I have to disagree with you. Use of acronyms and airport codes has NOTHING to do with snobbery, nor does it have anything to do with making people 'suffer'.
It is simply a quicker way to type things when discussing them. All of us see airport codes from time to time we don't recognise, so we look them up if we want to. This doesn't present any problem and keeps things on FT shorter and easier to read - both thread titles and posts themselves.
What is the alternative? Make everyone cater to the lowest common denominator of lazyness?
When new people come along and ask a question, the replies people give (as well as directing them to where to find an answer) invariably also explain or give the full name for what they should look for.
While many of us do not like outright spoon feeding (we don't come here to spend time just teaching others or to doing their basic research work for them), we do have a sticky which has a guide to many codes and also a guide to BAEC and its features, also people are invariably happily to expand/explain a term/feature/idea if someone is still confused.
[It is only some of the 'cheap fares' people (outside the BAEC section) who talk in pure code.]
It has to be said, if someone is not willing or able to read a guide or look things up to understand what they are reading, maby playing the loyalty game is not for them. The only alternative is that someone has to continually do their work for them, and again, people are not here for that.
MMB, MFU/UUA, 241, CCR, etc - all just shorthand, and the threads are a lot more readable because of it! [When I don't recognise something, an airport code, term in another FT section, etc, I look it up and if that doesn't help ask for clarification.]