Alphabet soup

An "alphabet soup" is a metaphor for an abundance of abbreviations or acronyms, named for a common dish made from alphabet pasta. Use dates at least as far back as Franklin D. Roosevelt's alphabet agencies of the New Deal.Fact|date=September 2008 In the United States, the Federal Government is described as an alphabet soup on account of the multitude of agencies that it has spawned, including the NSA, CIA, FBI, USSS, BATF, DEA, NCIS and INS. This phrase is especially used to described the alphabet agencies of the New Deal during the Great Depression.

Similarly, the many sanctioning bodies of boxing (e.g., WBA, WBO, IBF, WBC, IBA, etc.) are often referred to disparagingly as "alphabet soup organizations." At times, the Central Asian republics (such as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) that gained independence after the fall of the Soviet Union have been called "alphabet soup countries" because of their long and consonant-filled names.

As part of the inclusive nature of the homosexual civil liberty movements, the initialism LGBT is used to include Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transsexual/Transgender individuals. The ordering of initials is nonstandard and is often seen as GLBT or BLGT. Other initials may be added to include "A" for straight allies and/"or" asexual, "I" for intersex, "O" for omnisexual, "P" for pansexual, one or two "Q"s for queer and/or questioning, an additional "T" or numeral "2" for Two-Spirit, and "U" for unsure. The the Midwest Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally College Conference (MBLGTACC) has been recognized and affectionately referred to as the Big Gay Conference and the Alphabet Soup Conference to include the long list of non-normative sexuality-related identities.