True, but common usage has come to be that acronym also means any initialisation.
Maybe it should be TLI?
But then what of initialisations that can, by chance, be pronounced as words?
The initialisation of the British Broadcasting Corporation can't be pronounced, but the one mentioned above, Midland Electric Manufacturing, can be. What logic makes the 2nd an acronym but not the first?
And what of ones which could be pronounced as words but aren't, like GEC or ICI or MOT or UK? Are they acronyms because they can be pronounced, or not acronyms because they never are?
Then there are abbreviations which are pronounced as words in ways which break the rules. For example the abbreviations for the Joint Photographic Experts Group or the Moving Picture Experts Group would never be pronounced by an English speaker in the way that they are if he saw them written and had never encountered them before. Then of course there's the fact that we still pronounce them as words when they are written with the 3 letter filename extension - "it's a JPG file".
What of acronyms that have become common nouns, and have lost all capitalisation, like laser and radar? Or never were capitalised when first formed, like modem?
The reality is that it's less confusing and less inconsistent to stop drawing a distinction between "initialisation" and "acronym".
