Acronym Stacking

In my posting on almost-recursive acronyms, I noted that the company Cygnus, whose name expands to “Cygnus, Your GNU Support,” was not guilty of what I referred to as acronym stacking. This is the name I give to an acronym including a letter that abbreviates a different acronym; as I like to think of it, the first acronym is stacked on top of the second one. The first stacked acronym to catch my attention was the name of an issue-oriented political group called ACT-UP, an acronym for “AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.” Aside from the awkwardness of the phrase unleash power for the sake of having a meaningful acronym, my complaint was that you couldn’t tell what the A stood for. Yes, it stood for AIDS, but the A in AIDS stands for acquired. Shouldn’t this group more properly be known as AIDSCT-UP? Hard to pronounce, sure, but that’s not my problem. If you want to make a clever acronym, you still have to play by the rules; that it’s difficult to do is no excuse. It’s the same kind of aesthetic that goes for sonnets or haikus. And Cygnus beats ACT-UP in this regard, because its namers were able to create an interesting acronym that respected the acronym of GNU by incorporating it whole into the company name.

That’s my prescriptive take on how acronyms should be. From a descriptive standpoint, I’d say that if an acronym (such as AIDS) can be abbreviated by its initial letter, that’s just an indication of that the word has become so thoroughly ordinary that speakers hardly remember that it’s an acronym. I don’t know how I’d test this hypothesis, since there are so few stacked acronyms to begin with, but that’s my suspicion.

David Price sent me a good example of a stacked acronym, which is also an example of an almost-recursive acronym. He writes:

I was a little surprised to read your post on Volokh this evening, since I’d just been discussing this very kind of acronym a few days ago with one of my fellow interns at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

EFF puts on an annual free concert in San Francisco, called the “EFF Freedom Fest.” The name of the event, I’m sure you’ve noticed, can also be abbreviated as “EFF.” The ‘E’ in this acronym expands to “EFF”, but *that* “EFF” stands for “Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

“EFF” as an abbreviation for “EFF Freedom Fest” is therefore both almost-recursive and a product of acronym-stacking.

And now that we’ve wandered back onto the subject of recursive acronyms, Jonathan Ichikawa gave another example in a comment: A Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert and Wally talked about “The TTP Project.” This is another example that’s interesting for two reasons. One is that it’s a recursive acronym with a letter from the middle (i.e. the second T), not from the front, giving rise to the recursion. The other is that it’s a redundantly expanded acronym which is redundantly expanded on both ends. Of course, since it was intended to be a joke, I can’t really count it as a real linguistic example, but it was fun nonetheless.

And speaking of “it was fun,” I’ve enjoyed guest blogging here this week. Thank you, Eugene, for the invitation, and Conspiracy readers for your feedback. My future posts will not be appearing on Agoraphilia, but on Literal-Minded (“linguistic commentary from a guy who takes things too literally”), the linguistics-related blog that I’m starting. Cheers!