Stop Abbreviation

Reading this site one may notice that I like to affect a fairly formal style that is atypical of personal writing online, especially in regards how I use punctuation. I even use em-dashes and I promise it’s not because I am writing posts using large language models; I hate that shit! I am just weird and pretentious! But one old-fashioned stylistic choice that I keep going back and forth on is using full stops in abbreviations. Absolutely no one does this while writing casually and it’s rare even in formal writing any more—modern style guide generally discourage it. But I do just generally like how it looks! And, as said, I like being weird and pretentious and old-fashioned sometimes.

But it’s one thing to write common, long-established initialisms like U.K. or i.e. like this and quite another to call cascading style sheets “C.S.S.” No one has ever written it like that. It has a wrongness to it. That style of writing was already very old-fashioned and weird by the time CSS was invented. It’s from the wrong era.

And if using it in the context of modern vocabulary feels wrong and I am even more bothered by applying it inconsistently (which I do now) maybe I should just give up on full stop abbreviations and stop pretending that I’m a time traveller from when people still wrote “to-day” and “to-morrow” and start writing TV instead of T.V. like a normal person?