Canadian Government Weary of Patriot Act

IllogicalStudent writes "An article on canoe discusses how the Canadian government is moving to counter worries surrounding Canadian citizens' privacy being compromised by the United States' Patriot act. Apparently the FBI currently has the right, through Patriot, to search documents which may contain Canadian information sent to US firms carrying out work under contract. Thankfully, privacy still means something up here."

Comments

PATRIOT, etc

[Epistax]

This is a question I've had. A while ago I was given a new word by a teacher. I could have sworn she said "decronym", as it made sense, however that is not a word. The meaning of the word was so good that there must be a correct word out there for it.

The meaning I was told is a decronym is a word which becomes an acronym, after the fact. Such as in this case, "PATRIOT" existed for a long time and the word itself was (well, abused) by finding words to exactly fit it. The example we had in class was "BASIC", which originally stood for nothing but was then given the ol' beginner's all-purpose symbolic instruction code. This one was actually better than PATRIOT in that they called the language Basic, using this context, before it stood for anything.

Anyone know what I'm talking about? Does such a word actually exist? If not, can we make it now?