Slinging The Adoption Lingo

FAA ISO HBSIS POB NJ BM DNR DOB

So you thought you knew all the lingo there was to know? You learned that :-) is a smile, that LOL is funny, ROFL is hilarious, and you thought, like most of us, that you had it made. And then you joined our chat room, forum, or a mail list or newsgroup. And the gibberish began!

In the Beginning...

Back in the days of Internet Infancy, when we were all newbies faced with the challenge of sending messages out into the ether with fingers crossed, hoping someone was reading our words, we developed a kind of shorthand for long phrases which kept getting repeated over and over again. We were not very sophisticated, and our abbreviations started out as shorter versions of words. For example:

Birth mother became BMOM
Adoptive mother became AMOM
Prospective adoptive parents, (a real mouthful) became PAPS
and so on.

So, while IRL (in real life), we might never consider calling our parents our APARS (adoptive parents), in the new shorthand of Web-speak, where we wanted to make our meaning clear without an over-abundance of words, a new language was born.

Smaller is Better?

As more and more of the adoption community joins the legions of Netizens and Cybernauts, the evolution of adoption lingo is pushed along by more people
in a greater hurry
to get their information out
to more people
who are in greater hurry to read it.
And this could be leading the online adoption community into potential conflicts with others who are not attuned to our particular code.

The once-comfortable BMOM is now being supplanted by the even shorter BM... and those of us who have had ANY experience with children will tell you emphatically that IRL this has nothing to do with the biological relationship of one person to another!

Likewise, KC (kept child), PA (private adoption), and DC (death certificate) are bound to convince any student of geography that we've got it all mixed up!

Adding to the general chaos are wonderful resources reminding us that no matter what abbreviations and acronyms we choose to use, some just aren't going to work. Adoption-Speak, for example, takes issue with the entire vocabulary surrounding adoption, pointing out that "birth father" is, indeed, a non-sequitur (whether we use BF or BDAD).

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