We had one of these confusions at the Mountain View meetup this week. NLP: Natural Language Processing or Neuro-Linguistic Programming?
Nonetheless, humans are overall pretty good at dealing with linguistic ambiguities — enough so that we usually find them more groan-inducing (as puns) than actually confusing.
I posted this in the comments at Eric Raymond's blog:
Then I realized some here may find it useful.
Extensive use of abbreviations and acronyms was primarily a convenience for writers, when writing was done by hand and then by typewriter, there is less justification for it now when most writing is done by computer. And as my comment points out it is usually a negative for readers. It does benefit readers when you can convert a long phrase into a readable word, SCUBA and LASER spring to mind, but that doesn't occur often.