Backronyms

A discussion at work earlier this week raised the topic of technologists love of acronyms, including backronyms.  The participants in the conversation were clever enough to immediately grasp what a backronym is, but had never heard the word before.  For the unenlightened, Wikipedia defines a backronym as:

A backronym or bacronym is a phrase constructed after the fact to make an existing word or words into an acronym. Backronyms may be invented with serious or humorous intent, or may be a type of false or folk etymology.

I created a backronym once, with neither serious nor humorous intent.  My first job out of university was for a defense contractor who no longer exists, having been absorbed into a much larger defense contractor.  This company had spun out of another large defense contractor 20 years previously, in a revolt against their totalitarian management.  By the time I came along, the revolutionaries were of course long gone and the "little" company had developed it's own layers of totalitarian management.

My first task was working on what we would now term a "static code analyzer", along the lines of Klocwork or Coverity, but for Fortran programs.  My boss, the technical team lead, was a competent programmer and lovely young lady named Marty.  She wanted to name this program something sensible, but was disallowed by the management because this company was founded around the original version of this program from the 60s, a similar but simpler program that ran on Univac mainframes and was for no apparent reason called "The Text Editor", or TED.  A second generation of the program, which ran on both Univac and IBM/360 systems, was called TED-B, therefore this much expanded version for VAX/VMS was to be called TED-C and that was it.  Never mind that to the rest of the world "Text Editor" meant something entirely different by this time, this was and always would be (and probably still is) "The Text Editor."

A couple of years later, I developed a little program to help me pick apart network packets for my testing working.  Packet disassemblers are not rocket science (that's an inside joke for my friends who know what I was doing at the time), but for some reason nobody in the company had ever thought of doing this before.  Before I knew what was happening, this little program had become part of the official software tools list delivered to the government customer on the contract, which required documentation, and required a name for the tool.  All because I had the audacity to ask for access to an Ada compiler, mostly because I wanted to put Ada on my resume.

I talked over the name with my team lead, who had been around the office when the TED-C vs. XREF name wars were flying, and we conspired to pick a name that would be mildly embarrassing to the company.  Because this wasn't a real-time analyzer, but rather relied on loading message trace files from another machine, we finally settled on the rather twisted backronym "Post Execution ANalysis UTility," or PEANUT.

A couple of years later, I was working for another defense contractor in the government lab that was the support center for this system.  One afternoon my best friend and I were engaged in a hard-fought round of seeing who could score the fastest typing speed in "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" (I won, with 138 very practiced wpm) when we overheard some of my ex-co-workers excitedly discussing this oddball software tool they were going to have to host at the facility...

"Ada?  Where are we going to get an Ada compiler?  And who decided to call this idiot thing PEANUT?  What were they thinking?  Is there an author name in this?  Wait a minute...  PETERS!"

In the ensuing discussion, I reminded their lead engineer, a guy named Phil that I respected but didn't like very much, of the name war over TED-C, and he had a good laugh right along with me, then went back to cursing me.  I told him I'd be happy to contract out support for the tool, then ducked before he had a chance to throw heavy objects (namely Dr. Andrew) at me.

That, my friends, is a backronym.