A hackish (and especially
MIT) tradition is to
choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to
themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. 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 stands for "GNU's Not
Unix!" - and a company with the name
CYGNUS, which expands
to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support".
See also
mung.