What's the Worst Acronym You've Ever Heard?

mmaddox asks: "As a software developer, I've consulted on many projects - projects conceived in the twisted mind of management and marketing and cursed with bizarre, often hysterically funny names. Of course, these names lead to the adoption of the dreaded acronym. Most recently, I've discouraged the name selections of a few clients, in particular, the Private Inline Security System (a silly "personal firewall" - the client didn't even THINK of using an acronym) and Cross-section Heads-Up Digitizer (an engineering bit for roadway construction - anyone remember the movie?). There must be millions of these things out there. What is the worst acronym you've ever had the *ahem* pleasure of dealing with?" And in typical Slashdot fashion, it just wouldn't be the same without taking a dig at Microsoft. If you click here and look at the #2 result (of 44), then you may see one of funniest acronyms I've ever seen come out of the corporate culture. Of course, if you click on that particular link it looks like someone at the Borg have recognized their error and is trying to rewrite history, changing the "tool" into a "utility". God bless the Google cache! If you think you've seen acronyms to beat this one, please share!

Comments

acronym for acronyms

[cassidyc]

I;ve been working on a tool for our product. The tools it called CTE (an acronym for Component Template Extensions) Now the ironic thing is that the tools was originally called "acronyms"

Hence we now have a acronym for acronyms

Doh

CJC

Telephone Network Administration

[battjt]

Telephone Network Administration, but everyone used the acronym without cracking a smile. Of course I laughed out loud on a teleconference. I no longer work there.

Joe

Re:Telephone Network Administration

[HyperbolicParabaloid]

T 'n' A ... get it?

Re:Telephone Network Administration

[CokeBear]

Tits and Ass!

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

[wls]

Alphabetic Collection for Reducing Or Numbing Your Memory

Re:A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

[grammar nazi]

Has anybody ever played Acrophobia? I don't know if this game is still around or not, but they would give you a series of letters and everybody would come up with an acronym for the letters. Afterwords, everyone would vote on the best acronym that somebody would come up with.

I worked on a project by the name SCARFACE for a while. This sounds like a cool acronym, until you figure out that it's just a Schopping Cart And Register For Automated Credit Exchanges.

Re:A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

[Tony Shepps]

That was a fine game. I don't know why it died... it had to take almost no bandwidth at all to run.

Who wants to code the open source client-server version?

Re:A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

[CMiYC]

I really miss that game. When I first started working in the computer labs in college, I had to work the late night shifts. #acro got me through many late nights of bordem. After my 1st semester though, I didn't work those hours anymore and went drinking instead of played word games. ;)

Joke suggestion that got used

[Goose In Orbit]

I used to work at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham (UK) on their Laboratory system software. We wrote a rule-based system for the Liver Unit, which I labelled LUMPS (for Liver Unit Management Protocol System)

The name stuck... and when the Renal Unit wanted a similar system, LUMPS begat RUMPS.

At the time I left there was also talk of a system for the Maternity Unit - no prizes for guessing the acronym - but I don't think it never got used (the negative disease link probably didn't help), which was a shame because it also happened to be the name of the language the system was written in...

Re:Joke suggestion that got used

[JabberWokky]

What year was that? I remember a vastly simplified version in a David Ahl book in the late 70s. It was really cool, and he explained the history behind the lineage, which sounds very similar to what you're describing (of course, it's been 10 odd years since I read it, and that was for reminiscing value...). The same book had a program that simulated a nuclear reactor for the "new" system, the PET.

--
Evan

Business Functional Document

[dmorin]

When I first joined the team, hired by a friend of mine, we established what documentation would be used to define software projects. We came up with the "Business Functional Document", or BFD, which hopefully everybody knows also stands for "big f'ing deal". he got the expression into exactly *1* meeting before a marketing guy said "You can't call it that." Oh, well.

Just today I learned that my group is called Application Architecture, or AA for short. "Hi, my name's Duane, and I'm an architect." "Hi, Duane!!" I'm seriously thinking about calling my first white paper the 12 steps to web services.

True story that's not a bad acronym but we find it funny -- we used to be on Shared Enterprise Applications, or SEA. That group got disbanded and we are now Application Engineering Services, or AES -- SEA backwards. So the joke is that our mission statement is to do the exact opposite of what we did 6 months ago.

"Four S Club"

[dmorin]

Professor of mine told me the story about having to travel to a conference on the Statistics and Science for Social Studies, or "Four S" for short. He called the hotel to confirm his registration for the Four S meeting, and they asked for his credit card, which he gave them. after he hung up he thought that weird, because he had already given them the credit card once before. So he called back to check and asked if he was confirmed for the right conference. They said absolutely, he was all booked for the Society for Statistical Sexual Studies.

Swear to god. He said he had to seriously think about which conference he wanted to attend.

Re:"Four S Club"

[Dolly_Llama]

neato story but fyi, SSSS = Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and is more often referred to as "quad s"

Re:"Four S Club"

[dmorin]

neato story but fyi, SSSS = Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and is more often referred to as "quad s"

Hey, it's been about 12 years since I heard him tell the story, I figured I was bound to get a few of the words wrong. :)

funny acronyms

[rm-r]

From Red Dwarf IIRC: the Commitee for the Liberation of Intergalactic Terryfying Organisms and their Re-integration Into Society?

Re:funny acronyms

[flegged]

Another acronym from little red one :

Convict Army, Nearly All Retarted, Inbred Evil Sheepshaggers.

Canaries - Lister thought it was a singing group.

SHIN

[Nos.]

The Saskatchewan Gov't (that's in Canada) is working on a project called SHIN. Sask Health Information Network. Basically, getting everyones medical records onto a large database so an individuals records are available anywhere in the province. In any case, the Priemere at the time, Roy Romanow, referred to it as Sask Health Information Technology System.

Re:SHIN

[The Madpostal Worker]

A University in Virginia has a Student Information Network (SIN). I tell you sin can be a powerful thing.

Re:SHIN

[CokeBear]

Thats nothing. The Canadian equivalent of Social Security is called Social Insurance. Every time I get a job or file my taxes I have to provide my Social Insurance Number.

Re:SHIN

[Nos.]

Well I wouldn't say were exactly "near the left coast after British Columbia and Alberta". We're midwest, or the prairies by most definitions. And while your trying to show off your knowledge of Canada, and Saskatchewan in particular, at least try to get the capital right. I'll give you a hint, its NOT Saskatoon.

Re:SHIN

[PurpleBob]

Despite that everyone loves to appear smart by joking about this, it's good style to duplicate the last word of an acronym to provide context. This is especially true when the acronym is an existing word like 'pin'.

Re:SHIN

[Tony-A]

Seems like there's not a lot of "near" up there.
Think of Saskatchewan as northern Kansas. Very northern Kansas.

Re:SHIN

[JamesOfTheDesert]

Despite that everyone loves to appear smart by joking about this, it's good style to duplicate the last word of an acronym to provide context.

Why? That's the first time I've ever heard such a claim, and I'm wondering if you just made it up, and what the rational is.

Seems to me, if you're talking about getting money from an ATM, then you don't need the redundancy because the, er, *context* provides context. And if the initialism is unclear, then the proper thing is simply to say the words, not use the letters.

Re:SHIN

[PurpleBob]

I saw it in a style guide somewhere, but let me give an example. What if an ATM (you are correct that there is no need for clarification here) said "Please provide your PIN"? It would cause some confusion and make people have to reread the sentence a few times, even if they knew what PIN stood for. What if it was displayed in an all-caps font: "PLEASE PROVIDE YOUR PIN"?

People who are unfamiliar with ATMs might not even instantly realize what a PIN was, yet as long as it's described as a number they'd realize it was that four-digit thingy the bank gave them.

And anyway, acronyms contain meaning, not words. Not many people know what LASER stands for, but that doesn't matter because it has become a noun in its own right. The acronym refers to a process - Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation - yet it's perfectly acceptable to say "laser beam" without considering that if you were to attempt to expand 'LASER' in place you would have some clunky wording. If every acronym had to be expandable in place, you'd have to say something like "a beam from LASER". Along the same lines, you would "put on some SCUBA", and might have to say "He's diagnosed with the HIV".

Would you prefer that every time you read an acronym, you were expected to know exactly what it stood for so you would know its grammatical function in the sentence?

POS

[Pentagon13]

My first day at work I was given a polo shirt with the company logo in the breast area along with the name of our product, followed by "The Proven POS System". Since I was fresh out of college and not terribly bright, I automatically assumed that POS stood for Piece Of Shit instead of Point Of Sale. All I could think about is why on earth would they call their system a Piece Of Shit .. that is, until I figured out what it really stood for. I still can't bring myself to actually wear the shirt though.

Uh, that's easy

[autocracy]

It is /.

I mean how stupid is that? Oh sure! It's H-T-T-P-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org. Say what? http:///..org? Uh-huh...

Re:Uh, that's easy

[autocracy]

Yes, that is known. That was where the humor was supposed to be :)

WALTS

[SanLouBlues]

Weapons Analysis and Lethality Toolset
It's only funny because the guy running the contract is a bombastic old guy named Walt Zimmer (Walt's WALTS :).

A couple of my favourites

[Nik]

PCMCIA - People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms

PENCIL and PAPER - Plotter, Encoder, Notator, for Ciphers, Icons and Letters, for use with a Passive Accumulative Permanent/Erasable Raster.

N

As usual, the military's responsible for this one

[Raetsel]

There are various types of officers in the military... Flag officers, Field Grade officers, etc. The Navy has (in addition to numerous other classifications) LDOs, or Limited Duty Officers.

So, courtesy of the United States Navy's Naval Nuclear Power Training Command (NNPTC), I offer you the...

• Direct Input Limited Duty Officer, or DILDO

I have to assume that they didn't acronym-ize it right off when they chose the name, they aren't that dense. It went into actual use, and there were some affected officers who were genuinely offended by the acronym. It caused the whole title to be changed very quickly.

Funny database name...

[AtariDatacenter]

In our environment, the acronyms for test databases always start with a T and the acronym for production databases always start with a P. This was fine when then TENIS (electronic number inventory system) database was in development. Cute name, right?

Well, when they were putting it into production, they realized that they had a problem. Management decided to change the name to PNIS. Unfortunately, they didn't take into account how people would pronounce that, either. :)

If we're not limited to tech industry...

[Scooby Snacks]

...then I would have to say that my personal award goes to the USA PATRIOT act, not only for its cumbersome expansion ("Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism"), but also for calling one of the most un-Constitutional and rights-trampling pieces of legislation in recent years a "patriot".

Moderators, I leave myself at your mercy, but it just had to be said.

Courtesy of Red Dwarf...

[sab39]

Campaign for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society.

Re:Courtesy of Red Dwarf...

[BluedemonX]

Don't laugh that hard - there really was a "Canadian Ladies In Timber" organisation. I posted the story on this page.

Yes, BARH was bad...

[Argyle]

But the thing that sticks in my mind was the 'F-Test'

Not truly an acronym, nevertheless the compression of Freshman Test to F-Test, bought a whole new meaning to those 8AM exams...

BTW, when we you at RPI? I was '85-'89.

Political parties fall to this problem, too.

[mfarah]

In my country (Chile), some ten years ago, one of the then fragmented socialist-marxist left wing sectors formed the "Partido Amplio de Izquierda Socialista" (meaning roughly "Ample Left-Wing Socialist Party"; "PAIS" means "country"). They had to add the "amplio" ("ample") word, because the initial name "Partido de Izquierda Socialista" didn't have a good acronym ("PIS" means "urine").

They were, of course, the butt of jokes for this (after all, the inclusion of "Amplio" was notoriously forced). It was said that they handled other alternative names, like "Partido de la Izquierda CHilena Independiente" or "Partido de la Izquierda Popular Independiente" (more acronyms meaning urine).

Thank God that party didn't last long...

Re:Political parties fall to this problem, too.

[Glytch]

That sounds remarkably similiar to what happened here in Canada about a year and a half back.

The Federal Reform Party wanted to shed its image of being full of rednecks, so that they could win elections in the most populated areas and thus have a shot at becoming the government. So, they dissolved their party, and formed another one called the "Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party", or CCRAP. A lot of reporters and members if other parties made a lot of awful jokes about it really meaning "See? Crap!"

They quickly changed their name to the "Canadian Alliance Party", much to the dismay of the rest of the federal parties and the media.

WinCE

[Imabug]

Windows Compact Edition
WinCE

From Webster's dictionary
wince: To shrink or start involuntarily, as in pain or distress

Re:WinCE

[the phantom]

Ever notice how there's Windows CE, Windows Me, and Windows NT? Put it together, and what do you have?
br CEMeNT

Time and Attendence

[the phantom]

At the Forest Service, the time sheets were named with a long string of meaningless numbers and letters. They were called T'n'A for short

Canadian Politics

[Stavr0]

When the Reform Party, headed by Preston Manning went thru some changes, decided to rename themselves, they went thru some difficulties finding a new name.
For a while they were called Canadian Reform/Alliance Party

Re:Hard to beat the military...

[TheConfusedOne]

Or the Jeep's replacement that we call the HumVee: HMMWV - High Mobility Multi-Wheel Vehicle

Frankly the more colorful military acronyms are usually "obfuscated" using the radio letters. My favorite is the ol' Charlie Foxtrot which is the obfuscation of the acronym CF which of course stands for Cluster Fornication (yeah, cleaned it up a bit).

And whats the deepest non-recursive one?

[Bazman]

Where one of the letters of the acronym is an acronym. And one of its letters is also an acronym. Etc.

e.g. GCC is GNU Compiler Collection (these days) and GNU is GNU's Not Unix. Hence GCC has depth 2. I'm sure you can do better!

Baz

Re:And whats the deepest non-recursive one?

[__past__]

Try to beat the GNU HURD:

HURD = HIRD of Unix-Replacing Daemons, where
HIRD = HURD of Interfaces Representing Depth.

Re:And whats the deepest non-recursive one?

[Bazman]

That's _indirect_ recursion! Maybe I should have explicitly said no _indirect_ or _direct_ recursion.

I'm sure I asked this on our local BBS and we got something that was three or four levels deep. Danged if I can remember what it was though!

Baz

Re:And whats the deepest non-recursive one?

[pthisis]

GPCL = GTK Pattern Creation Lab
GTK = Gimp Toolkit (original expansion)
GIMP = GNU Image Manipulation Program
GNU = GNU's not Unix

Re:And whats the deepest non-recursive one?

[PurpleBob]

Try GAIM.

GAIM = GTK AOL Instant Messenger = GIMP ToolKit America OnLine Instant Messenger = GNU Image Manipulation Program ToolKit America OnLine Instant Messenger = GNU's Not Unix Image Manipulation Program ToolKit America OnLine Instant Messenger.

not very technical

[gtx]

i was playing frisbee one day, and this kid brought a frisbee in that had "Canadian Ultimate National Team" written on it. now, as i understand it, the team is really called the Canadian National Ultimate Team, however, the (unintentional?) switching of the two middle words made for an amusing acronym

-c

Tech Support Staple

[sharkey]

PEBKAC

Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair

ORGI

[kryzx]

The best I've seen is the Office of Register General of India (ORGI), the Indian census. It's obvious how ORGI is pronounced, and it is the most commonly used term for their census organization. The best part is that the folks there use the term all the time, yet don't realize the humor in it.

SEx and Camping

[andaru]

At Orban, I worked on QNX drivers for a 16-channel audio I/O device called Sound Exchange. That was quickly shortened to SEx, but soon thereafter, we realized that the longer version, SExchange, was even better (more descriptive, and it rolls off of the tongue.

So I came back from an awesome camping trip, and for months told everyone, "I'm still camping." I called my cubicle my 'campsite' (I guess my system was the campfire), and considered getting my title changed from Software Engineer to Software Ranger.

We had a dry erase board which listed what all of the engineers were working on at the time. I was happy to see that several months after I had left there, the dry erase board still said, "Andrew - SEx and Camping."

What a job!

Re:SEx and Camping

[PurpleBob]

This reminds me of something. Supposedly, there was a newspaper ad once which said "Saturday is Goodsexchange Day!"

Searching for this on Google gives the newspaper reference, as well as an unfortunate organization that had it as two separate words but needed to give themselves a URL, and a banner ad service called "goodsExchange", which is a bit less prone to misinterpretation.

TMTOWTDI

[42forty-two42]

Where I heard it

I'm sterile and pee and tell.

[NewWazoo]

I work for a research lab at FSU (that's Florida State Univ) that does work with the FL Dept. of Transportation.

The name of our research lab? The "Information Processing and Transmission Engineering Laboratory". Or the IPTEL. Or the I-P-and-TEL.

How about our DOT branch office? Well, it used to be the Signals and Traffic Engineering Research Lab. Or the STERL, pronounced "sturl". We all called it the "sterile". They've since dropped the S, so it's the TERL.

Just my little bit.

Brandon
(NewWazoo)
Proud member or STERL, IPandTEL.

WTF?

[crazyj]

I got this one in my email at work today: "...by a lower level Program Steering Committee (PSG)..."

I believe this is the first acronym I've seen where the acronym seemed to be random and not actually based upon what it stands for.

Was good, but got renamed

[Nos.]

We have an inhouse app called SSA, Support System for Agents. Originally (or so the rumour goes) it was called Agent Support System.

I would have oh so loved those support calls...
I've got a problem with my A$$.

Guess we would have needed a proctologist on speed dial :)

Re:Bachelor of Science (BS)

[dead_penguin]

A friend of mine has a bachelor's degree in journalism. The official abbreviation is BJ.

Re:PCMCIA

[Colin Bayer]

Also from acronymfinder:

VERONICA

Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-Wide Index to Computer Archives

One that got caught...

[CharlieG]

Library Information Exchange System

Re:Hard to beat the military...

[CharlieG]

and the CF can become a RCF (Royal)
Then there is
Snafu
furbar

One of my favorites from machine shops - the RCH

Red Female Pubic Hair

for a VERY small dimention

TERD and DGSP

[InitZero]

When first developing our NT domain structure, the working group had a very high level 'Universal Resource Domain' as the starting point. All the users would be in that circle. Of course, the corporate name has to be slapped on everything we do. Thus, it was named the 'Tribune Universal Resource Domain'. It lasted for a few months as that until we did the final diagrams for the management group. Since there was little room, we cut it down to TURD. Needless to say, the name was changed. (Unfortunately, the NT domain structure stayed.)

When taking a class on IBM's AIX clustering system, HACMP (High Availability Clustered Muli-Processing), I came across the acronym DGSP. The IBM instructor didn't know what it stood for. (Functionally, DGSP is a system scram when things are so hosed up that the node is better down than up. It happens when one node can't talk to another node in the cluster.)

A few months latter, I was taking the advanced HACMP course at CLAM, the company that actually wrote HACMP for IBM, and asked about DGSP. They were able to explain that DGSP stands for 'Die Gravy Sucking Pig'. In some versions of HACMP you can strings a binary and find that for yourself.

IBM takes itself way too seriously, however, so gravy sucking pigs would never go over in their offical documentation. So, if you trudge through their updated documentation, you'll see that they say DGSP stands for 'Diagnostic Group Shutdown Partition'. That, by the way, makes substantially less sense than Die Gravy Sucking Pig.

InitZero

DNS: no no, not that one...

[Spoing]

...the imfamous one; Gate's "Digital Nervous System".

Just hearing it is sickening and depressing at the same time.

Promoting that phrase showed how little MS (and Gates specifically) knew about this Internet thing -- or it was intentional to cause confusion and like other attempts to weaken anything not invented at Microsoft. I vote for stupidity or simple envy wrapped up in a Freduan slip over mallace, though it's not a confident vote. Either way, truely scary.

One acronym and some OT rambling (OASOTR)

[Mignon]

In most submissions I've read so far, the story is funnier before the acronym gets out. Here's one along those lines:

In Durham, NC (USA), the story goes that there was a contest to name the local bus system. After some months, the leading candidate was "The Bus." It has a certain folksy charm to it, don't you think? They went with DART (Durham Area Rapid Transit.)

It's not an acronym, but I thought I was pretty clever with the name of a system I worked on. We were upgrading reporters in our news department from Word Perfect on DOS to Word on Windows (OK, so upgrade isn't the best term) and I had a new machine to test the new environment. To reflect the new OS, I called the new system "New Shell", but preferred to think of it as "News Hell."

For the same reporters, I wrote the client side of a program for filing stories which I called "Scooper." The reporters liked it for suggesting getting a scoop on a story (beating the competition), but my private image was of a pooper-scooper to reflect the crap that they produced.

When we wrote the scooper program, one of the things we wanted was to have good error reporting. I was meticulous and read about error codes in the SMTP RFC. The guys who maintained the back-end of the news system had an expression for when things were bad. They would say, for example, "News is on fire! I can't talk now!" So, following the advice in the RFC, this state returned error code 451 (the Fahrenheit temperature when paper combusts, for those of you who haven't read Ray Bradbury.)

(What do you know, I managed to work acronyms into three out of five of the above paragraphs!)

Re:One acronym and some OT rambling (OASOTR)

[Tony-A]

The old DOSSHELL
DOSS with 2 esses.
HELL with 2 ells.

FUD - see why inside

[SirSlud]

Why, you might ask?

Fear, uncertainty and doubt. I mean, here we are, trying to convince to casual consumers that MS intentionally attempts to confuse people, and we wrap it in a confusing acronym?!

I mean, how counter-purpose can you get?

I haven't seen TWAIN mentioned yet...

[IPFreely]

I always liked TWAIN drivers (those nice drivers for capturing images from scanners, cameras and whatever.
Technology Without An Interesting Name.

Re:I haven't seen TWAIN mentioned yet...

[mosch]

TWAIN isn't an acronym, according to the twain.org FAQ:

The word TWAIN is from Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" - "...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the standard. "

Three faves

[Sebbo]

SOFA (Students On Financial Aid)
VENOM (Vicious Evil Network of Mayhem)
GROSS (Get Rid Of Slimy girlS)

SHT, ROADSTER, WILLPOS, CEMENT

[lkaos]

Funny:
SHT - Segway Human Transport

Worst for complexity:
ROADSTER - Remote Operative for Advance Electronics Guided Information Systems Distributed Systems Tactical Element Remedy

Worst for just plain sucking:
WILLPOS - At Work IndividuaL Lunch Personal Ordering System

Obligatory MS Crack:

Windows CE + Windows ME + Windows NT ==
Windows CEMENT

It has to be said...

[addaon]

Segway Human Transporter? http://www.satirewire.com/news/0112/sht.shtml

Not an acronym, but...

[Ellen Ripley]

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada, and we used to have a cable TV provider called Prime Cable. It didn't take too long to start calling them Crime Cable.

Naturally we were disappointed when we heard they were being bought out. I mean, what were the odds that the new company would have a name as easy to make fun of as Crime Cable?

Thank you, Cox!

Ellen

Re:Canadian Reform Alliance Party

[schon]

Actually, the C stood for Conservative, not Canadian (Reform tried - and failed - to merge with the Federal Conservative party, they figured they might win some Tory supporters if they gave them top billing.) It was part of their "Unite the Right" initiative.

Personally, if they'd gone through with it, I would have voted against them every chance I got, because I hate the Federal Conservative party (because of the asshole Mulroney - I hate the GST.)

I'm not exactly sure what the offcial name is now, but it doesn't have a crap accronym.

The official name is now simply "The Canadian Alliance"

STOMITH

[megabeck42]

Shoot The Other Machine In The Head. An Explanation. I'm serious.

A local college name....

[namtro]

up until a few years ago it was simply "Friends University of Central Kansas," now they're just "Friends University"

Re:Hard to beat the military...

[david duncan scott]

"High Mobility Multi-Wheel Vehicle"? Is this so you don't confuse it with the Assault Unicycle?

Anything from IBM

[red_dragon]

I rather like many of the funnier acronyms that have been mentioned here so far, but the ones that seem to be most annoying are those that seem to be redundant, useless, and unusually long. As we all know, IBM is known for its knack for coming up with all sorts of TLAs and SFLAs, but they also coined what seems to be the only two-word acronym, which in turn is made up from various smaller acronyms: BICARSA GLAPPR, short for Billing, Inventory Control, Accounts Receivable, Sales Analysis, General Ledger, Accounts Payable, and Payroll. And that is pretty scary.

Acrophobia Info

[CritterNYC]

Acrophobia was great, but is, alas, no more. During the merge-fest and flopping around of bezerk, uproar, iwon, flipside, etc, it got cancelled. But it is supposed to be coming back. (Unfortunately, that page has been there for a while)

But of course, some fans decided to make their own version. Check out AcroChallenge for one option. I've played it, it works pretty well. Check out Acro All Night for news related to Acrophobia.

TANSTAAFL

[nuggz]

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress -Heinlein

A pretty good book, now if only he could write an ENDING in any of his books

Sony Petabyte Fileserver working name...

[MadCow42]

Ok, I'm not sure I believe this one, but it came from a co-worker that used to work in Marketing for Sony Canada:

Sony was working on a Peta-byte tape server system for extremely large storage requirements. You guessed it, they wanted to name it the "Peta-File"... until the connotations were carefully explained to them.

(ok, so that's not an acronym, but it fits the same subject)

MadCow.

Re:Canadian Reform Alliance Party

[Martin Blank]

Nixon had a group working for him leading up the the 1972 election called CREEP -- Committee to Re-Elect the President. Kind of ominous, considering the context.

Re:Business Analysis Request Form -- BARF

[Martin Blank]

The place I just left had a Network Access Request Form. I called the author Pinkie once when I had a question about it. He didn't get it.

Re:As usual, the military's responsible for this o

[Dolly_Llama]

Im sure this sea story is as old as I am, but..

This is a no shitter... onboard USS [insert submarine name], nubs are ordered as part of some maint. to go back aft to "blow the eow"

which at first sounds like a random valve, but actually stands for "engineering officer of the watch"

Archive search system group

[miratim]

My company uses three letter acronyms to designate groups of modules. Each module in a group is then named in the form "XXXYYYY.cxx", where XXX is the group acronym, and YYYY is a four letter word, which theoretically describes the purpose of the module The archive search system is one of my favorites. Especially the archive dump module, or ASSDUMP.

As a kid I used to go to this school...

[Harumuka]

They called it Parkview Middle School. Upon visiting the school I remember a student asking his mom if that's what she had. Of course, the (female) principal demanded splitting the first word, so now it's Park View Middle School.

Fast Action Response Team

[StandardDeviant]

This from a friend's father who was in the (American) Drug Enforcement Agency. I think there was also a TITS, but I don't recall what it stood for.

CONDOM: Catholic women's college

[ralfp]

Colllege of Notre Dame of Maryland

an all-girl's Catholic collge

TIARA

[radja]

TIARA is one of my favourites.. TIARA Is A Recursive Acronym.. I still have to find a good project for the name to go with :)

//rdj

Re:T.A.

[frog51]

T.A. - Territorial Army, or the weekend soldier reserve types. Okay, it isn't as funny as tits'n'ass, but it's the meaning most folks in the UK will think of first.

Re:WYSIWYG

[TheLink]

More accurately:
On screen: what you see you hope you get.
After: What you see is what you regret.

:).

Canadian Ladies In Timber

[BluedemonX]

No word of a lie.

They couldn't figure out why it was that people
snickered like CRAZY at their booth at tradeshows, which by definition (logging industry) is filled with roughneck, redneck, chainsaw toting tobacco chewers.

They eventually changed it to something else, I believe. But for a while the lobbying industry in Canada to get women to be lumberjacks was called exactly that.

What about PNAS?

[smoondog]

I can't believe that no one has mentioned PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. If you say it really fast during talks you can get some inquisitive looks, but no one dares smile.

-Sean

Man, that is deep!

[(void*)]

Since GNU in infinitely recursive, GCC effectively has a depth of Aleph + 1.