What's the Worst Acronym You've Ever Heard? 299
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!
acronym for acronyms (Score:2, Funny)
Hence we now have a acronym for acronyms
Doh
CJC
recursive acronyms (Score:1)
TINTOS Is Not TOS
funny acronyms (Score:2, Funny)
Re:funny acronyms (Score:2)
Convict Army, Nearly All Retarted, Inbred Evil Sheepshaggers.
Canaries - Lister thought it was a singing group.
Telephone Network Administration (Score:5, Funny)
Joe
Time and Attendence (Score:2)
Re:Telephone Network Administration (Score:2)
Re:Telephone Network Administration (Score:3, Funny)
Not Mine (Score:1)
Re:Not Mine (Score:1)
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.
Re:Not Mine (Score:1)
A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. (Score:3, Interesting)
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. (Score:2)
Who wants to code the open source client-server version?
Acrophobia Info (Score:3, Informative)
But of course, some fans decided to make their own version. Check out AcroChallenge [acrochallenge.com] for one option. I've played it, it works pretty well. Check out Acro All Night [erols.com] for news related to Acrophobia.
Re:A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. (Score:2)
Joke suggestion that got used (Score:3, Funny)
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 (Score:2)
--
Evan
AcronymFinder (Score:1)
Well.. (Score:1)
AAAAAAA -- All-American Association Against Acronym Abuse Anonymous, too.
EEETLA -- Enhanced Expanded Extended Three Letter Acronym, is also nice.
Business Functional Document (Score:4, Funny)
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" (Score:4, Funny)
Swear to god. He said he had to seriously think about which conference he wanted to attend.
Re:"Four S Club" (Score:2)
Re:"Four S Club" (Score:2)
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. :)
N.A.D.S. (Score:1)
An alternative for those in the philly area that didn't want to make the hike all the way to philly. Yes I'm responsible for the name... Although I got my current job through it.
P.L.U.G. (Score:1)
For those that don't want to drive to Philly for PLUG (Philladelphia Linux Users Group)
SHIN (Score:3, Funny)
Re:SHIN (Score:2)
Re:SHIN (Score:2)
Re:SHIN (Score:2)
Re:SHIN (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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?
Re:SHIN (Score:2)
Re:SHIN (Score:2)
Think of Saskatchewan as northern Kansas. Very northern Kansas.
POS (Score:3, Funny)
Uh, that's easy (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A couple of my favourites (Score:2, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Re:As usual, the military's responsible for this o (Score:2)
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"
Funny database name... (Score:3, Funny)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
Moderators, I leave myself at your mercy, but it just had to be said.
Courtesy of Red Dwarf... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Courtesy of Red Dwarf... (Score:2)
Political parties fall to this problem, too. (Score:3, Funny)
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. (Score:2)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
WinCE
From Webster's dictionary
wince: To shrink or start involuntarily, as in pain or distress
Re:WinCE (Score:3, Interesting)
br CEMeNT
Canadian Politics (Score:4, Funny)
For a while they were called Canadian Reform/Alliance Party
And whats the deepest non-recursive one? (Score:2)
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? (Score:2)
HURD = HIRD of Unix-Replacing Daemons, where
HIRD = HURD of Interfaces Representing Depth.
Re:And whats the deepest non-recursive one? (Score:2)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
GTK = Gimp Toolkit (original expansion)
GIMP = GNU Image Manipulation Program
GNU = GNU's not Unix
Re:And whats the deepest non-recursive one? (Score:2)
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.
Man, that is deep! (Score:2)
not very technical (Score:3, Funny)
-c
Tech Support Staple (Score:2)
Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
ORGI (Score:2)
SEx and Camping (Score:3)
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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sterile and pee and tell. (Score:2, Funny)
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? (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
I would have oh so loved those support calls...
Guess we would have needed a proctologist on speed dialI've got a problem with my A$$.
One that got caught... (Score:2)
TERD and DGSP (Score:2)
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... (Score:3, Interesting)
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) (Score:4, Insightful)
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) (Score:2)
DOSS with 2 esses.
HELL with 2 ells.
FUD - see why inside (Score:2)
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... (Score:3, Interesting)
Technology Without An Interesting Name.
Re:I haven't seen TWAIN mentioned yet... (Score:2)
Three faves (Score:2)
VENOM [tripod.com](Vicious Evil Network of Mayhem)
GROSS [msstate.edu] (Get Rid Of Slimy girlS)
SHT, ROADSTER, WILLPOS, CEMENT (Score:2)
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... (Score:2)
Not an acronym, but... (Score:2, Funny)
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
STOMITH (Score:2, Interesting)
A local college name.... (Score:2, Funny)
Anything from IBM (Score:2)
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.
TANSTAAFL (Score:2, Interesting)
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... (Score:2)
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.
Archive search system group (Score:2, Funny)
As a kid I used to go to this school... (Score:2)
Fast Action Response Team (Score:2)
CONDOM: Catholic women's college (Score:3, Funny)
an all-girl's Catholic collge
TIARA (Score:2)
//rdj
Canadian Ladies In Timber (Score:2)
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? (Score:2)
-Sean
Yes, BARH was bad... (Score:2)
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.
Re:Hard to beat the military... (Score:2)
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).
Re:Hard to beat the military... (Score:2)
Then there is
Snafu
furbar
One of my favorites from machine shops - the RCH
Red Female Pubic Hair
for a VERY small dimention
Re:Hard to beat the military... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bachelor of Science (BS) (Score:2)
Re:PCMCIA (Score:2, Funny)
VERONICA
Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-Wide Index to Computer Archives
Re:Canadian Reform Alliance Party (Score:2, Informative)
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"
Re:Canadian Reform Alliance Party (Score:2)
Re:Business Analysis Request Form -- BARF (Score:2)
Re:T.A. (Score:2)
Re:WYSIWYG (Score:2)
On screen: what you see you hope you get.
After: What you see is what you regret.
:).