2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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recursive acronym
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose
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acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other
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acronyms/abbreviations. The original of the breed may have been TINT ( TINT
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Is Not TECO ). The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ( EINE
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Is Not EMACS ) and ZWEI ( ZWEI Was EINE Initially ). More recently, there is
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a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU
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(q.v., sense 1) stands for GNU's Not Unix! and a company with the name
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Cygnus, which expands to Cygnus, Your GNU Support (though Cygnus people say
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this is a backronym ). The GNU recursive acronym may have been patterned on
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XINU, XINU Is Not Unix a particularly nice example because it is a mirror
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image, a backronym, and a recursive acronym. See also mung , EMACS.
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