this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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As a kid, I was in the room at one point while my mom was watching some TV show, maybe law and order or something similar. I heard somebody letting somebody else know (verbally) the details of some victim and described the cause of injury or death or whatever as "GSW". I asked my mom what GSW meant. She said "gun shot wound". I said that that couldn't possibly be right, and she was curious why. I said because "gun shot wound" is 3 syllables and "GSW" is 5; it's literally quicker to say the full thing.
So yeah, GSW is fucking stupid when said aloud, and even me as a dumbass child knew that.
I guess it's faster to write, so people started to say it as well.
How often do You have to use the phrase "gun shot wound" in everyday speak? Found the American.
It was specifically in a police TV show, spare us the tried joke.
It's used a lot in law enforcement and certain medical environments like hospitals with trauma centers and morgues.
In law enforcement? Probably every day, yeah. The average person, surprisingly not all that often. In fact, law enforcement probably uses it hundreds of times a day, and more importantly writes and reads it hundreds of times a day, thus the acronym.
Even that is a very American way of thinking. The number of gun shot wounds a police officer sees in the US is way higher than in comparable European countries.
I could not find exact data for wounds, but if you take gun fatalities as placeholder (I am sure they are connected) here:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-from-firearms?tab=chart&country=AUS~USA~DEU~CAN~FRA~ESP~ITA~JPN
You can see that precovid (2019) in the US there were 63x more gun fatalities than in Germany per person. In an average 1 million person city the police in the US has to deal with about 32 gun fatalities. In Germany that city has 1 every other year, in Australia it is 1-2 every year.
While the fictional US police department has every two weeks one or more fatality, the fictional German and Australian see it once a year.
So the frequency of it occuring and it being written about is way higher in the US than in comparable countries.
(Of course the comparing the amount of firearm fatalities between countries is not an exact replacement for gun shot wounds, but it should be close)
Don't worry, I liked your post.
W does that in acronyms. Compare syllables in World Wide Webβ¦
At work we often say "dub dub dub".
WTF?
WWJD?
WTFWJD??
GSW isn't an acronym as far as I'm concerned. It's an initialism. But it sure is stupid, I will say. Much faster to say it the "long" way.
I think you mean GSW IAAAFAICIAI
Given how many times people make this same initialism point, itβs time we made an acronym for it.
That's an unfortunate, incorrect phrasing. π
It's a very deliberate phrasing, since not everyone agrees that initialisms are not acronyms.
Personally I think that "ackhually that's an initialism not an acronym π€" is exactly the kind of ultimately irrelevant distinction that internet know-it-alls love to know and point out. I know because I used to be like that too when I was younger.
But often those distinctions are not universally acknowledged or useful in all contexts. Like how strawberries are not scientifically berries, but we still often group them as berries.
Nitpicking word definitions is pointless when the distinction being pointed out is not relevant for the conversation.
I'm not saying I'm the tone of "aaackshually".
I personally love to learn these types of things, so in case someone learns something they'd like to learn, I'm here for it. If people get butthurt or annoyed about it because "I've been using it wrong and that makes it right..." π€·ββοΈ I dunno.