What's this site about?

The Will Selfs of this world never tire of advertising the fact that their smugness and pedantry far outstrip their charm. Maplaw.org is a method website that exists to aid them in this worthy endeavour. In an episode of Shooting Stars Self berated another contestant for claiming an abbreviation was an acroynm and not an in initialism, which was debatable, unhelpful and not at all funny. Maplaw will soon eliminate one more excuse for the self-satisfied balloons that exhibit such behaviour to subject an ailing race to their inane commentary - by Making All Permuations of Letters into Acronyms and Words. It'll probably take a while but it'll be worth it.

How do I make a maplaw?

The steps are:

• Register or login.
• Go to the 'My Page' section.
• Click on 'create new maplaw'.
• Enter some words, their acronym and a definition for the new word.
• If you like you can also enter a lexical category and a pronunciation guide.
• Click on 'preview' to see if everything is as you like it.
• If not, click on 'edit' to edit your maplaw.
• Once you're satisfied, click on 'create maplaw'.
• Done!

How do I comment?

In order to comment you have to be logged in and have at least one approved maplaw. This is to save the comments area from being deluged with rubbish.

How do I vote?

As with comments, in order to vote you have to be logged in and have at least one approved maplaw.

Can I include HTML?

To avoid problems with unclosed tags, cross-site scripting and so forth all HTML is stripped out automatically. If there's some HTML you really want included in your maplaw then send it to us via the feedback form and we'll include it.

What makes a good maplaw?

This is subjective, but a few guidelines are:

• Make it original.
• Make it relevant, funny, informative, gratuitous or otherwise noteworthy.
• Methods of creating acronyms vary - they do not have to exactly match the first letters of all the words. For example, sometimes words like 'a' or 'the' count and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the first letter of a word isn't used but a later letter, e.g. in XML - the 'X' stands for 'eXtensible'. You may choose to make them completely different to illustrate a point. However, they should generally be quite close.

What is IPA?

IPA is a language that uniquely represents the way words are pronounced. The phonology of words is not always obvious from the spelling. The ability to add a pronunciation guide should clear this up, although it doesn't have to match the rest of the maplaw at all.

My maplaw's a sequence, not a permutation!

Possibly so. The size of the set of maplaws that are permutations (in the strictest sense) is vanishingly small in comparison to the size of the set of maplaws that are sequences. Yet the site is called 'maplaw'. This is because:

1. It's only in the strictest sense.
2. Maplaw sounds better than maslaw. If you feel the need to set up a site called 'Make All Sequences of Letters into Acronyms and Words' in order to overshadow ours, go right ahead.
3. Obsessive over-attention to detail really isn't what this site is about. We suggest you learn to relax.
4. We got it wrong.