PPE

Workshop and ward share this shorthand for the gear that guards the wearer against injury, poison or infection: helmets, goggles, gloves and the rest. It usually behaves as a mass noun, so you don your PPE or wear full PPE. It also works before another noun, as in PPE principles. Careful writing spells the phrase out first and puts PPE in parentheses, as Nazia Parveen's 2020 report on NHS health workers did.

A British degree course, introduced at Oxford in the 1920s, whose graduates fill much of the country's political and civil-service elite. The abbreviation often carries that connotation in public commentary. David Runciman, writing in the London Review of Books in 2011 about the narrow education of both front benches, could simply quote the line "PPE has a lot to answer for" and be understood.

An accountant's shorthand for the long-term tangible assets a business uses in its operations. These are reported on the balance sheet at cost less accumulated depreciation and impairment. It is also written PP&E, and the ampersand keeps it visibly apart from the safety-gear sense when the two might meet on one page, such as a manufacturer's annual report.

A piece of bulletin-board history: compiled PPE modules extended PCBoard software in the early-to-mid 1990s, adding door games, menu enhancements and custom routines to dial-up systems. The term belongs to that world and faded with it once the World Wide Web displaced bulletin boards. Today it is a historian's or enthusiast's word, best used in past-tense accounts of how those systems were run.