RIVER CITY JOURNAL: WE'VE CUT OUR LANGUAGE INTO SUCH SMALL BITES I CAN'T CHEW THEM

I think that I shall never C an acronym as lovely as a B. If I should live to C all the acronyms flee, it would suit me to a T.

It all started, I think, when garbage collectors became sanitation engineers.

That was OK with me. I don't blame anyone for trying to put the best spin possible on their careers. After all, editors are basically memo writers who go to a lot of meetings. But "editor" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

While I can cope with high-falutin' titles for the things we do to earn money, I continue to be baffled by all those acronyms. These all-capital-letter labels are hard to figure out sometimes. If you ask what they mean, you give away the fact that you don't know very much about careers that can be summed up with a few letters of the alphabet.

What the heck. I don't know very much anyway. So I usually ask.

Because new technology has taken over newspapers as well as most other businesses, I hear of lot of short, two- or three-letter buzzwords whenever I go to professional meetings. Editors from bigger newspapers like to talk about the problems they're having with their IT departments.

Not too long ago, I sat through a session at a newspaper seminar that lasted over an hour, during which one of the participants talked about his IT troubles. His eye-tee troubles, if you get my drift. Pretty soon everyone in the room was talking about IT this and IT that.

When all the IT insiders had said everything they could think of to say, I took the opportunity to ask what an IT department is.

You should have seen the stares I got. You know what I mean. These were looks that said: And you call yourself an editor?

I tried to explain that in all the memos I had ever written or received and all the meetings I had ever attended, I had never heard about an IT department before. And, I said, I was awake during a lot of those meetings.

A fairly heated discussion ensued about how maybe the standards for editorships have sunk too low. When the meeting was over, I still didn't know what an IT department is. But I knew I was supposed to be having problems with mine if I ever found it.

When I got home from the seminar, I called one of my editor friends at another newspaper.

I asked: Do you have an IT department at your newspaper?

Sure do, he said. And then he started telling me about all the problems he was having with his IT department.

I tried to be polite, but finally I had to butt in just long enough to ask if he could tell me what, exactly, an IT department is.

He was stunned.

As it turns out, an IT department is an Internet Technology department.

Oh, I said. You mean Webmasters and so on.

He snorted. You can't call them Webmasters any more. They are multimedia technicians. Some of them are information management specialists.

I actually understood a little of what he was saying. A few months ago, our younger son moved to Kansas City to become the vice president of new media for a huge architectural firm.

Oh, I said. You're going to be the Webmaster?

You should have seen that look too.

One of our top editors and most valuable employees is leaving to be a Webmaster. She knows a whole lot about the Internet and home pages and Web sites and browsing and computer stuff. She's pretty proud of being a Webmaster.

I told her: No. No. No. You don't want to be a Webmaster. You want to be a new media systems analyst. Or an integrated communications consultant. Or director of Web communications and home-page architecture. Or just about anything that can be turned into a string of letters -- the longer the better.

When people ask me about my hobbies, I rarely say golfing and lawn mowing. I say golfing and landscape architecture.

I know. It's a stretch. About the golfing, I mean.

But I figure as long as those rock walls I built for the flower bed are standing, it's OK to be a landscape architect. If those rocks fall over, I'll become a demolition consultant.

I'll stop now. It's time for me to be a nutrition evaluator. I do this three times a day. Or more. It's much more satisfying to evaluate nutrition than it is to eat dinner.

Don't you think?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.