I'm thinking of an abbreviation that starts with W

[deckardcanine]

From Tuesday to today, I was editing the references sections of chapters of a long document. This kind of editing has the slight upside of being easy most of the time, but reformatting an entire set done consistently one way would aggravate someone less pseudo-autistic than me. These chapter refs were written up by different people, thus the double-edged sword of variety.

The author of one particular chapter does something I've never seen before. His/her style is largely that of the APA, except that organization names are treated the same as human names. So if a source comes from the Institute of Medicine, he/she starts the ref with "Medicine, I. o." Animistic, are we? The same problem sometimes comes up for publishers: "O. o. P. Affairs." It took me a while to figure out that that was probably the Office of Population Affairs (properly abbreviated OPA).

What really gets my goat is when it's an especially long set of initials. I had to Google source titles to determine the meaning of "UPMC, S. o. t. C. f. B. o." and "Health, N. C. f. D. P. a. C. s. M. S. o. P."

No way am I subjecting our readers to this.