Mark Liberman has a funny post up about recursive titles. The example he gave was a linguistic in-joke about a mythical series of replies to a book called "Leave your language alone", the recursion being at both ends: "Leave 'Leave Your Language Alone' Alone", "Leave 'Leave "Leave your Language Alone" Alone' Alone", etc.
This reminded SC of something that passes for humor among computer scientists, the recursive acronym. Your host would guess that the most well-known such acronym is GNU, which expands to "GNU's Not UNIX", which could in turn expand to: "GNU's Not UNIX Not UNIX", "GNU's Not UNIX Not UNIX Not UNIX", and so forth. Or perhaps it should be "GNU's Not UNIX's Not UNIX", the "'s" string not being deleted on subsequent expansions. There are plenty more such acronyms available through the Jargon File.
You can't forget Dilbert's classic TTP: "The TTP Project"
Posted by: fling93 | June 24, 2004 at 04:26 PM