Word: acronymed
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...brass are worried that the Serbs have moved hundreds of SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles toward Albania, lurking in the valleys the Apaches would follow into Kosovo, just waiting for the gunships to cross the frontier. "The Apaches are MANPADs magnets," an Army officer says, referring to the acronym for Man-Portable Air Defense System, used for the small-missile launchers. "We keep asking the Army," a Joint Staff officer says, "how many Apaches they think are going to come back." That's why the helicopters--initially heralded as saviors--still sit at their Albanian base, twiddling their rotor blades...
Things like this happen enough that the military has an acronym--SNAFU, for "situation normal, all fouled up"--to use in polite company for such errors. "This is the first time I have been aware of where there were inadvertent, unintended casualties because of a target mistake at the wrong facility," a U.S. intelligence official said last week, using synonyms for SNAFU four times in a single sentence...
Does anybody remember RSI? A year ago, even the few of us unsure of what the dread acronym stood for (for the record, both repetitive strain injury and repetitive stress injury are correct) knew enough to tremble at the slightest twinge in our wrists. Idle hands would lapse unconsciously into the aptly-named "prayer stretch" as we invoked our various patron saints to protect us from the debilitating disease. These days, however, as the "RSI Action Group" mousepads at email terminals start to fray at the edges, the former scourge of the keyboard seems about as threatening as scurvy...
...time, in a Europe not so different from our own, there was a tiny Balkan country called Syldavia. When uranium was accidentally discovered in the Zmyhlpathian Mountains, the normally peaceful Syldavians embarked upon an ambitious nuclear energy program, protected by a sinister counter-espionage organization known only by the acronym ZEPO. Work began on a top-secret nuclear powered rocket, capable of sending a heavy payload out of the earth's atmosphere. On a still summer evening, the Syldavians surprised the world by launching the X-FLR6 on a mysterious course for outer space...
Other names proposed and discarded included the Harvard College Student Council and the acronym-friendly Harvard University Government of Students...