Omg. Backronyming… has this word been coined or did you just come up with that?
/r/backronyms is probably a thing, too. Or it should be, at least.
Overall, how much money in hourly wages was spent backronyming?
The marketing department at my company has spent the last six months coming up with new, unified names for four related products we acquired through acquisitions. Their combined talent and wisdom has led to the products being renamed Product I, Product II, Product III, and Product IV.
It’s one of those words that started that way, but evolved into a normal word, rather like radar and its spinoff, lidar. Laser also gave us the back-formation, lase.
Why does everyone want to drain his lab?
PHP Hypertext Preprocessor*
You’re right, there seem to be a lot of self-referential stuff in software (especially the *nix and OSS community). WINE is WINE Is Not an Emulator. I never realized GNU was that silly, though. I always assumed it was legit and official sounding.
I’ve never seen the gerund form of the term used, but I did not originally generate the portmanteau myself.
We named some software Elvis for execute with a live information system. That was ok. But when we made Tshirts referring to Elvis’s world tour - we heard from the lawyers of Elvis’s estate
I once calculated that a company meeting spent a little over two thousand pounds in salary arguing about a shade of green.
Money well spent, in my opinion, because I voted for the winner.
I think there were 3 of us in that meeting. Each making around $30/hour, so ~$180. Which, if you think of it that way is probably less than what you’d pay a consultant to give you three options to choose from. That said, I don’t think we’d used it once after the white paper was issued, and it has since rebranded since the IP changed ownership.
I was an engineer on a government project. The first time an acronym was used in any document it had to be spelled out (expanded) in parenthesis. This resulted in endless hours of argument between senior Air Force officers as to whether or not RADAR was still an acronym. I was on straight salary, so I didn’t make any money listening to this drivel.
Put simply, in deference to you, Kent, it’s like lasing a stick of dynamite.
-Chris Knight, Real Genius