recursive acronym

convention 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.

[Jargon File]

(1995-04-28)