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People have been spamming USM nonstop due to the whole "USUM reminds me of SuMo so I'm going to use USM because redundant to put the U twice."
Back many years ago when emojis didn't rule the Internet, we had this thing call a forward slash.
It's this: /
You an see it twice in the board's name, /vp/.
However, people will often be lazy and call this board vp without the forward slashes. That is because the forward slashes are implied. We all know they are there, so there's no point in typing them unless we want to.
Trolls have twisted this logic around in promoting USM over USUM, and I'm here to set things straight.
Around the era of Diamond and Pearl, D/P was the common abbreviation. Very few people actually used DP. It was always R/B/Y, G/S/C, etc. You can look this up in archives and find that using the forward slashes was much preferred. Around the time Platinum came out, the forward slashes became implied, so instead of typing D/P/Pt every time, people would just say DPPt. No one would call it DPt, because "t" does not stand for "Platinum."
Now, fast forward to today.
B/W became BW
HG/SS became HGSS.
B2/W2 became B2W2
X/Y became XY.
OR/AS became ORAS
S/M became SM
If you call it "USM", you are implying that it's US/M, just like if you call it BW2, you are implying that it's B/W2.
The abbreviation was NEVER (BW)2 or U(SM). Can you type them out like that and be correct? Yes, it IS technically correct.
This is basic math.
(B2)/(W2) = (B2)(W2) because it is "culturally implied" that there is a / between (B2) and (W2), just like (D)/(P)/(Pt) = (D)(P)(Pt) is correct because the parentheses imply that what is enclosed is its own game and what is between the sets of parentheses have /s in between them.
U(SM) implies that Sun and Moon ARE THE SAME GAME, which they're not, so you can't use USM as the abbreviation since it DOES. NOT. APPLY. Only USUM can work because US is its own game and UM is its own game, therefore (US)/(UM) = (US)(UM) = USUM
Understand?
