A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose
acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other
acronyms/abbreviations. The original of the breed may have been TINT
(TINT Is Not TECO
). The classic examples were two MIT
editors called EINE (EINE Is Not EMACS
) and ZWEI
(ZWEI Was EINE Initially
). More recently, there is a Scheme
compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and
GNU (q.v., sense 1) stands for GNU's Not
Unix!
— and a company with the name Cygnus, which expands to
Cygnus, Your GNU Support
(though Cygnus people say this is a
backronym). See also mung,
EMACS.