Journal: News & Comment

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Have a banana

I've never liked acronyms, especially those used as heavy-handed jargon whose only purpose seems to be to exclude people who don't understand it.

Even so, sometimes acronyms are both useful and funny. The one I discovered most recently (though it has apparently been around for some time) is closely related to NIMBY, "not in my back yard": it is BANANA, "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone" (or "anything" in some variants).

While searching for BANANA on the Web, I found a list from the University of Washington that includes a few more land-use terms:

• BANANA =Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything
• LULU = Locally Undesirable Land Use
• NIABY = Not in Anyone's Back Yard
• NIMBY = Not in My Back Yard
• NIMTOO or NIMTOF = Not in My Term of Office
• NOPE = Not on Planet Earth
• SLAPPs = Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation
• TOADS = Temporarily Obsolete Abandoned Derelict Sites
• YIMBY = Yes in My Back Yard

My back yard isn't much for building -- it's pretty much a narrow slab of concrete.

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