<RANT>
If I have to read the letters IMHO in an email one more time I think I am going to scream. For those of you who are fortunate enough to not know what I am talking about, this is a rapidly growing trend in modern email communications. People are too lazy to actually type the words “in my humble opinion” so they throw some meaningless acronym in there as a substitute. I see this being used on a lot of large distribution lists at work and I know that there are probably many people that have no idea what the acronym actually means.
The thing that's particularly annoying about most of these is that they are meaningless even when they aren't reduced to an acronym. Why does someone even need to say “in my humble opinion?” We know it's your opinion because you are the one writing it. Just write your opinion and be done with it already. Chances are you aren't even all that humble about it since you chose to send it to hundreds of people.
The event that got me thinking about this happened the other day. I was reading someone's email that was posted to a large distribution group and he used the acronym FWIW not once but twice in the same email. I sat there for about 5 minutes trying to figure out what FWIW meant. Even in the context of the email I still wasn't getting it. So I went to the Acronym Lookup Tool hosted on our company Intranet (some team actually spent time and money developing a technology to help people understand these things if that tells you how bad the abuse has become) and I found out that it means “for what it's worth.” Again, a meaningless statement even when expanded to proper English.
</RANT>