An informant in Technoland reports to me that staff members in the informant’s company who come from India and Taiwan (and possibly other countries as well) are accustomed to abbreviating follow(-)up (verb or noun) in in-house writing as “f/u” — an obvious, and clearly useful, shortening in the right context.
Of course, this clashes with the associations that many of the American staff have for the abbreviation. Things like
We need to f/u.
can be problematic. The question is: What, if anything, should the American staff do about this?
(Things are more complex if the staff are writing to customers rather than to other staff.)
