It can be argued that the ten plagues visited upon the Egyptians were the unintended consequences of Pharaoh's refusal to let Moses' people go. Even so, unintended consequences didn't receive serious study until Adam Smith introduced consequentialism during the Scottish Enlightenment, then languished in obscurity. The study of unintended consequences returned to public attention in the 20th Century with the publication of “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action”, a paper written by sociologist Robert Merton in 1936. Even so, awareness has brought scant relief.

Not being social scientists, most of us are familiar with unintended consequences as the results of Murphy's Law. Generally, there are three categories:

• Positive: An unexpected benefit also known as luck or serendipity.
  


• Negative: A unexpected side effect in addition to the desired effect.
  


• Perverse: An intended solution which exacerbates the problem that the action was intended to correct.
  

Inasmuch as Murphy allows only for perverse outcomes, we must assume that he was an optimist.

Life is far too complex for anyone to fully master their little corners of it. Thus, isn't it better that we avoid centralized control wherein the unintended consequences of decisions affect society at large? I am perfectly willing to suffer the fate of my own decisions. I'd rather not suffer their mistakes, too. How about you?

When I arrived in Vietnam during the war there, I was equipped with all that I needed to survive. Jungle fatigues. M16 rifle. Steel helmet. Flak Vest. Anti-malarial pills. A MACV Phrase Card. The pills didn't work. I contracted malaria. The MACV Phrase Card, purportedly intended to help me communicate with Vietnamese-speaking civilians didn't perform much better. Indeed, their speech was no more comprehensible than the text messages that I receive on my cell phone today.

Be of good cheer. Help is available. Just bookmark AcronymFinder.com. It defines more than 4 million acronyms and abbreviations. Of course many of these may represent more than one word or phrase in much the same way that words and phrases may have more than one meaning. Just look up the word “frog” in the dictionary and you'll find more than twenty-seven options. Thus, “The ABBR for ABBR is ABBR”. Go ahead, decipher that.

Imagine the potential that your Tweets will have once you become adept with acronyms and abbreviations. Each 140 character Tweet built from acronyms and abbreviations averaging four characters (including a trailing space) would contain 35 words. I can't wait to amaze my children with my new found “skill”.