What's in a Name

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5th February 2007

WHAT'S IN A NAME

Brian Grainger

brianATgrainger1.freeserve.co.uk

I am a sucker for a clever use of words to provide a laugh. This article looks at a few instances of this, from disparate sources over the last few weeks.

There are those that despise the use of puns and clever word play. Television situation comedy in the UK used to be based on such scripts. Nowadays, it is derided in favour of comedies such as 'The Royle Family' and 'The Office' which draw their comedy value from laughing at real life situations. In the first case a family sitting watching the TV. In the latter, working in an Office. Personally, I find very little to laugh at in either of these and similar 'comedies'. Maybe I am a 'Grumpy Old Man', but I fancy there are lots like me.

The computer software industry seems to be rife with people with a talent for puns. Of course, those working in the proprietary software industry tend to be constrained by their masters. These days, you do not see many references to hidden bits of humorous code or 'Easter Eggs' in the mainstream software coming from Microsoft. In the Free Software community the tradition lives on.

First off are the self-referential (recursive) names, i.e. acronyms that include the acronym in the fully expanded version of the name. There are a LOT of these in the Free Software world and it started right at the beginning with GNU, the original Free Software project started by Richard Stallman. GNU was a project to develop a 'free (as in freedom)' operating system. At the time, the major operating system used in US academia was Unix, so the new operating system was based on Unix. However, GNU's Not Unix, which is how GNU got its name!

Here is a list of self-referential acronyms:

GNU	GNU's Not Unix	The original free software project
WINE	Wine Is Not an Emulator	a program which allows you to run some Windows programs under Linux.
PHP	PHP Hypertext Preprocessor	a free software equivalent of ASP, (Active Server Pages, from Microsoft), which allows the creation of dynamic web pages by the server.
Pine	Pine Is Not Elm	Elm is an ELectonic Mail client on Unix
Eine	Eine Is Not Emacs	Emacs is a text based editing system that is very popular in the software development community.
Zwei	Zwei Was Eine Intially	See Eine!
Mince	Mince Is Not Complete Emacs	See Emacs
Tiara	Tiara Is A Recursive Acronym	The acronym that defines itself
VISA	VISA International Service Association	Not computing - but perhaps the most well known self referential acronym

If you liked these acronyms then Wikipedia has a whole host of them at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym

The next category are not self referential but I find them amusing:

TWAIN	Technology Without An Interesting Name	Used in scanning software. This maybe an example of a bacronym(!), a word that originally was not an acronym but later gets interpreted as one.
Windows	(1) Windows Is Not a Defined Operating/Working System (2) Will Install Needless Data On Whole System	Another bacronym that I found particularly relevant.
Swan	System without a name	no idea what it referred to
POTS	Plain Old Telephone System	as opposed to ISDN, say, which is faster and has more bandwidth
PANS	Public Access Network Services	which is slightly different from a telephone line

A list of all sorts of acronyms, bacronyms and irreverent meanings can be found at:
http://meta.uncyclomedia.org/wiki/UnSource:List_of_acronyms
(Warning: This site contains adult references)

Before leaving the computing arena I want to mention a definition that I had never heard before. It was this definition, which I found in Computer Weekly, that triggered me to research and write this article.

If you look at the servers web sites use to deliver their pages the one that is ubiquitous is Apache. This is open source software and I always thought it got its name from the Native American nation. Computer Weekly says the unofficial derivation was that the system was put together from patches, so it became 'a patchy server'!

Moving away from computers you often see shops and businesses that have wittily devised names, either intentionally or otherwise. Just recently, readers of the 'Daily Telegraph' in the UK have been writing to the editor with their examples. I think they deserve a wider audience. The best are listed here:

A builder in Sussex - William the Concreter
A supplier of concrete in Essex - Jim'll Mix It
A petrol station in Cromwell, Nottinghamshire - The Oliver, Cromwell
A gardening business - Lawnorder
A second hand furniture ship - Junk and Disorderly
A firm of solicitors in Sligo - Crooks and Phibs
A building company - Complete Fabrications
A cleaning company - Spruce Springclean
Some more solicitors - Wright-Hassell
A furniture store - Dante's Infurniture
A collectables shop - Den of Antiquity
A plumber - Napoleon Boilerparts
A lay-by eatery on the A38 - Breakfast at Timothy's
A fast food business in James Herriott country - All Pizzas Great and Small

Finally, Computing, the trade paper, has invited readers to suggest the names of pubs suitable for retired IT personnel. Examples so far include:

The Control-Break
The Task Bar
The USB Hive
The Blue Screen (of death, presumably!)
The Blue Tooth
The Chip and Pin
The Mat and Mouse
The Agreed Downtime
The Chad and Sprocket (for those who worked in the big-iron days)
The Floating Point (for the pub located near water)
The Any Quay (another waterside pub)
The Scroll Lock Inn (for the canal side hostelry)

Finally, if the pub sells cheeses and cooked meat perhaps it should be called:
The Ctrl-Alt-Deli

A delicious pun to end on, I think. If you have any more examples or ideas for consideration then send me an e-mail. The best will appear here!

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