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Acronyms

I love anagrams, antigrams, acronyms, portmanteau... Wordplay being very broad, I love some classic ones. However, I don't know wordplay in my native language, which is being infiltrated by plenty of neologisms that make me scratch my head.

It might be obvious but many, if not all, are politically incorrect such as the following antigram:
    "Funeral - Real Fun".
As inappropriate as it sounds, it is also true that there are some comical people who use funerals for internal politics.
Joking aside about it being a dying industry, the funeral industry seems to be thriving in the Land of the Rising Sun (Dunning of his Salter).

"Atticus Pünd", the name of the detective in "Magpie Murders" (邦題『カササギ殺人事件』) by Anthony Horowitz, is believed to an anagram, but I had better avoid analyzing the word. 
On the other hand, "The Warsaw Anagrams" by Richard Zimler, the author of "The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon", is pretty good.

"The Warsaw Anagrams" & "The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon"

In the following, the number 619 constitutes a natural ambigram:

Image via Wikipedia

And this number 619 is known as a strobogrammatic prime. Such primes are listed in OEIS A007597, where 7597 is a semiprime 71 × 107 and the two factors 71 and 107 are both emirps. This isn't deemed mathematically important though.


Before getting back to the subject, let me mention that old-fashioned RSVP ("Répondez s'il vous plaît") is not an acronym but an initialism.

Some funny acronyms to start with:

  • VOLVO (Very Odd-Looking Vehicular Object) is very classic and convincing.

  • SNAFU/SUSFU/FUBAR 

  • MALÉV (Magyar giközlekedési Vállalat), which no longer exists, had a nasty expression "Many Awful Landings Encourage Vomiting", though I didn't find anything wrong in my flight from Budapest to Amsterdam in April 1988.

  • In March 1988, I learned TAROM (Transporturile Aeriene Române) was an acronym of "Tired And Rusted Old Machine" during my visit to București when Nicolae Ceaușescu was still alive (abbreviated as NCWSA).

Image via Wikipedia

The fourth one cannot be popular...most likely under a similar reason why the following joke does not work:

Radio Yerevan was asked: "Why did they establish a Ministry of Navy in landlocked Armenia. Do you have a sea?"
Radio Yerevan answered: "To spite Azerbaijan. They established a Ministry of Culture."

https://www.reddit.com/r/armenia/comments/956p47/the_legendary_halfforgotten_radio_yerevan_jokes/

Incidentally, the state mentioned by Radio Yerevan is effectively the same as DPRK (Dreadfully Pathological Remediless Kim-dom) ruled by a president by hereditary succession😱 but only rich enough to shut up high government officials in EU😶

For 30+ years I worked in an acronym-loving-industry, in a broad sense since many of them are pronounced as separate letters, but I found them tasteless except for some such as GNUTWAIN (Technology Without An Interesting Name) is mediocre.

I don't appreciate the following:
   MATH - Mental Abuse To Humans
There are many serious and conscientious, if not advanced, articles on mathematics indeed in the note community, and I respect those creators. However, I occasionally encounter Mentally Absent Technically Horrendous articles or Morbidly Aggravated Talk in Hallucinations on mathematics either caused by utter misunderstanding, mere aversion to mathematics or motivated by a singular Japanese religion asserting that the mathematics by Kiyoshi Oka (岡潔), who is doubtlessly a highly distinguished mathematician, is the only authentic mathematics. I fully expect objections, which I won't entertain😎





How about the following ?
Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy (ELON MUSK) Act (by Mark Pocan)

Image from Rep. Mark Pocan @RepMarkPocan (on Twitter)

I reacted with "no chance" in my mind, but

Silence is complicity… no need for annotation for decently educated people.
Image from AZ QUOTES via Pinterest

Header Image Credit: Taken from a post (in Twitter) by Richard Zimler on 5th November 2024. In the post he said

May empathy, kindness, goodwill and respect win in America. And may the majesty of the Grand Canyon continue to inspire our dreams of a fair and just and welcoming country.

https://x.com/SokoKhazar/status/1853762446617632965






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