Acronyms Gone Wrong – IOTW Report

Acronyms Gone Wrong

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The law school at George Mason University changed its name to the Antonin Scalia School of Law last week in honor of the late Supreme Court justice—and then changed its name again after what the Wall Street Journal calls “unforeseen and unfortunate” wordplay involving acronyms: ASSLaw, or even worse, ASSoL. The university, which changed the name after a $20 million donation from an anonymous donor, is now calling the school the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. “is trending. Lol. I don’t think this is the PR they were expecting,”tweeted one observer.

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18 Comments on Acronyms Gone Wrong

  1. I worked for an advertising company that merged with another, and both had a slew of subsidiaries. After the merger, they put all of these smaller semi-independent companies under the rubric of “Diversified Agency Group”, until someone in an Australian unit pointed out that “DAG” is slang there for the material that sticks and hangs from the back end of a sheep.

  2. I also worked for a company called “International Time Sharing” (ITS), which merged with a less-cool company called “United Computing Systems” (UCS). We thought the new acronym should be ITSUCS.

  3. @ChiGuy: You might (or might not) appreciate the following excerpt from Errol Flynn’s autobiography, My, Wicked, Wicked Ways, in which he described working on an Australian sheep farm when he was a headstrong youth:

    “I was the newest man and had to begin at the bottom — the bottom of the sheep itself — literally. I was one of four men in a line, an assembly belt for sheep shearing. The first man took the young hogget, as a young lamb was called, and he had to “dag” him; that is, he must get rid of the bluebottle flies and all the accumulated excreta around the tail. This he did by holding the sheep in his left hand, and his right hand went in and “dagged” the sheep. He grabbed a handful of the sheep’s [excrement], tossed it aside, and passed the sheep on to the man next to him.

    The next man was me.

    All I had to do was stick my face into this gruesome mess and bite off the young sheep’s testicles. Dag a hogget. I had good teeth. I put my nose into this awful-smelling mess, my teeth solidly around the balls of the six-month-old sheep, and took a bite while I held him upside down. My nose was in fur and ordure. I bit and spat out the product into a pile of what they called prairie oysters.

    …The sheep never let out a bleat. You bit, you spat out something like a couple of olives, and passed it on. Every day I had my proportion of oysters. The bluebottle flies swarmed all over me.”

    Turns out the method of castration described was the most sanitary (for the sheep, anyway) at the time, and rarely resulted in infection.

    M.W.W.W. is a pretty good read, actually. I would recommend it.

    🙂

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