Fun with vocabulary.
This is truly amazing. This is (more or less) the first time I ever used digg. OK – I admit I’ve been out of the loop. Word of the day is mung. I came across this word at the very end of a very long and very well written rant.
It’s designed to all fit together. Not just munged after-the-fact to go together OK, but designed from the ground up to be a single coherent system. And when something doesn’t fit, it’s a bug to be fixed, not just “part of the game”.
From dictionary.com mung = an acronym / mash until no good.
Don’t you just love it? But it gets better. In researching the definition of mung, I learned about Finagle’s law, the folk version of Murphy’s Law – which (of course) I already knew. But it gets even better.
Some technical and scientific cultures (e.g., paleontologists) know it under the name `Sod’s Law’; this usage may be more common in Great Britain.
Summary:Â Murphy’s law / folk version = Finagle’s law which is known by British paleontologists as Sod’s law.
I learn something new everyday.
A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE (“EINE Is Not Emacs“) and ZWEI (“ZWEI Was EINE Initially”).
which leads to backronym = backward acronym – did you know – Discovering backronyms is a common form of wordplay among hackers?
tags
mung recursive+acronym Finagle Sod’s+law backronym backward+acronym
technorati ping / blog phil.rice / mung / recursive+acronym / Finagle / Sod’s+law / backronym / backward+acronym /