A Challenge for the English Majors or the PROgrammers

January 03, 2009

I've been reading about Ruby a lot. Ah, what fun. Often, I see people saying things like DRY and REST and (worst of all) RESTful, and no matter how many times I look up those terms, I always forget what they mean or why I should care. Due to this, I'm fairly certain they're basically buzzwords that mean nothing. Or at least they mean nothing for which there isn't already a word.


So... I hate those terms.

I was just reading a thread where someone used the acronym LOC for lines of code. I realized that this acronym doesn't piss me off, even though it took me a few seconds to figure out what LOC meant. But if the author of that post had written LOCal (meaning: pertaining to the lines of code), I might have vomited.

Herein lies today's challenge:

Who can come up with the most vomit-worthy compound use of an acronym?

Rules and things:
  • Chatting/texting acronyms (LOL, WTF, BRB...) don't count, unless you manage to come up with something amazing.
  • Bonus points for using vomit-worthy acronyms.
  • Mega-bonus points for writing a program to help you find as many as possible.
  • Super-mega-bonus points for writing a program that finds as many as possible and automatically makes an 'educated guess' at their meanings.
  • INSTANT WIN for actually making me vomit (without the aid of disgusting pictures or fingers down my throat or syrup of ipecac, mind you).

My humble first (lame) entry to get the ball rolling: POSitive
I can't figure out what it would mean, though. A good piece of shit, perhaps? Like "Plan 9 From Outer Space is totally POSitive!"

Come on. SOMEONE can do better than that....

2 comments: to “ A Challenge for the English Majors or the PROgrammers

  • Dan Gr
    January 5, 2009 at 12:41 PM  

    this doesn't exactly fit, because as I understand you are looking for acronyms+, either in the form of adjectives, adverbs or complex noun extensions, right? anyway, this one has been bugging me since October, I think it was October: J the P. frankly the only thing worse than a reporter talking about J the P was one talking about him as J the P, as if he wasn't actually talking about him, and wanted to be sarcastic about the whole thing and thought he was being clever even though every reporter was referring to him as that. the one to really make you barf though is the even shorter JTP.

  • joem
    January 5, 2009 at 2:58 PM  

    Oh god.... I hadn't heard that until now! Due to its horribleness, I'll say that counts.

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