grammarsluts: initialism vs. acronym

Acronyms are words formed from the first letters of other words: NASA is a good example.  C.I.A. is not an acronym because you do not pronounce it like a word but rather say the individual letters (C-I-A)—it, along with F.B.I., N.A.A.C.P., and G.O.P.,¹ are initialisms.

I go back and forth about how to write these things.  As you can see above, lately I've been inclined to write acronyms without periods and intialisms with, but I think that that's fairly arbitrary, even if it does have a logic to it.  I believe The Economist goes all the way in treating acronyms like regular words and writes shit like "Nato" and "Aids," and this does make some sense given that we no longer capitalize SCUBA [self-contained underwater breathing apparatus] or LASER [light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation].  If you're going to make it a word, you might as well make it a word; otherwise it's basically just a cute way of pronouncing an initialism.

Actually, here's Garner's excellent Dictionary of Modern American Usage on the subject: "The trend nowadays is to omit the periods; including them is the more conservative and traditional approach.  Yet surely if an acronym is spoken as a single word (e.g., UNESCO), periods are meaningless."  Aw, yeah.  "If an initialism is made up of lowercase letters, periods are preferable: rpm looks odd as compared with r.p.m., and am (as opposed to a.m.²) looks like the verb."  Garner doesn't explicitly address the question of periods in capitalized initialisms like O.K.—although actually elsewhere he says of OK, O.K., and okay that "Each of these is OK—but nowadays the first is the most OK of all."  So I guess he's basically in support of periods only for lowercase initialisms.

So then my question is this: since O.K. most likely stands for the ironic oll korrect,³ wouldn't it make sense to write it in lowercase letters, as o.k.?  (Same for ASAP: as we wouldn't write As Soon As Possible, how about a.s.a.p.?⁴)  Garner's talking in large part about convention (he tries to strike a balance the "rules" and practical usage, prescriptivism and descriptivism), and it's clear very few people write o.k., but doesn't it make sense?  The lowercase acronym thing is establishedly a British thing, I see now (from Garner), but I like it—and as I mentioned, we've already gone that route with some: snafu's another.  This question also comes up with New York neighborhood names like SoHo [South of Houston], TriBeCa [Triangle Below Canal], and NoNo [NoHo and NoLIta⁵]: how about Soho, Tribeca, and Nono, which many do already?

[Grammar is not for everyone.  For those with weak—you know—grammarstomachs, I have included a photograph of famous porn pop star Christina Aguilera wearing a Deep Throat T-shirt.  This is in no way meant to suggest that Christina Aguilera is a grammarslut, although really who knows?  All I can say is I appreciate the giraffe.  Does anyone know, by the way, whether I'm right to italicize "deep throat" above?  I mean, is the T-shirt a movie tie-in or just a gag shirt?  It does have that 1970s look to it.  Bonus question: was the movie a reference to the whistle-blower or did the whistle-blower name himself after the movie?  Or was it a coincidence?  I could look this up but don't feel like it.  Get off my back, DAD.]

¹ Cole Porter makes an acronym–initialism joke when he rhymes G.O.P. with top.

² Ante meridiem, folks, not meridian.

³ According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the Oxford American Dictionaries "widget" built into the Apple OS, Merriam–Webster's online dictionary, and the good old Oxford English Dictionary.

⁴ That is unless you actually treat that as an acronym, as some do.  Doesn't Austin Pendleton do that in Short Circuit?  Or am I just thinking of "stat"?

⁵ North of Houston and North of Little Italy.  In case you're wondering, nobody actually calls this little rectangle "NoNo" (or "Nono")—no, no Nono—but everybody should.