Recursive Acronym and Friends
With the XNA toolset (which stands for XNA’s Not an Acronym) finally getting its day in the sun there has never been a more appropriate time to talk about recursive acronyms than now. This is a very important subject and I hope you take this lesson to heart; it might one day save your life.
A recursive acronym is an abbreviation that refers to itself in the expression for which it stands. One of the most prominent recursive acronyms is for the PNG file-type. PNG stands for PNG’s Not GIF (although officially it stands for Portable Network Graphic). This is an especially witty name once you know a bit about the history of the file-type. Regardless of boring file-type wars the recursive acronym PNG uses the acronym PNG inside itself. Talk about clever.
There are other wonderful examples of this, here are a few taken from Wikipedia:
Wine — Wine Is Not an Emulator
Zombie — Zombie-Oriented Machine-Being Interface Engine
Bob — Beware of Bob (from Twin Peaks)
VISA — Visa International Service Association
Mung — Mung Until No Good
LAME — LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder
It gets stranger still. A backronym is an acronym that was created ‘after-the-fact’. In other words you create a word and then acronym it later (e.g. iPood could stand for Isolated Programmer On Over-Dose). There are several types of backronyms.
Pure backronyms works like the example above and are added after the fact to change the meaning of a word. Replacement backronyms are acronyms that replace previous acronyms. Spam, which is a combination of Spiced and Ham has been replacement backronymed to sometimes mean Spare Parts Posing as Meat or Slime Posing As Meat.
A Apronym is an acronym that is relevant to the topic of the acronym. An example of this is BASE (Building, Antenna, Span, or Earth) jumping. Most acronyms are usually apronyms as well.
Mnemonic backronyms are used to help with remembering tricky groups of items. An example of this would be HOMES for the names of the Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior).
Anacronym are backacronym that have either been replaced with another meaning or removed altogether. The SAT Test (which is an example of RAS Syndrome, more on that later) is a perfect example of one of these. SAT originally stood for Scholastic Achievement Test then Scholastic Aptitude Test. It was then changed in 1990 to the Scholastic Assessment Test. Finally, in 1994 the test was renamed once again to the SAT with SAT having no acronym at all.
The last type of backacronym is the false backacronym, these are acronyms that are falsely believed to mean something when they mean something else. The catch is that the meaning remains the same but the words differ from the original acronym. A fine example of this is R.I.P. Anyone who took latin in high school knows that R.I.P. stands for Requiescat in pace. Anyone who’s school couldn’t afford latin classes (like the good people at Noble America) might think that it stands for Rest in Peace. The interesting part of this is that they both convey the same meaning regardless of the naïve misunderstanding.
One final interesting acronym related top is RAS Syndrome. RAS Syndrome stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome. This is a quite common occurance. Examples include ATM Machine (where ATM stands for Automated Teller Machine), PIN Number (Personal Identification Number), HIV Virus (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). In each of these phrases a term is used twice. Ha! Languages are crazy!