"Essays" recursive abbreviations

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A recursive abbreviation is a recursive acronym, which is a recursive reference to its own abbreviation in the full name.

An earlier tradition in the hacker community in the computer field (especially at MIT) is the use of humorous references to abbreviations of their own or other abbreviations. The earliest instance could be the TINT ("TINT is not TECO") that occurred during 1977 or 1978, and TINT was not a text editor or a modifier, it was a magicsix editor. It also inspired the naming of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's two Lisp machine editor, one called EINE ("EINE is not emacs", EINE isn't Emacs), and the other ZWEI ("ZWEI was EINE Initi Ally ", Zwei first was eine). Later, Richard Stallman's GNU (GNU's not Unix,gnu was not UNIX). Many recursive abbreviations include negative words, which are often used to point out that the abbreviation refers to something that is not similar to another (but in fact, the thing A is usually very similar to B or even a derivative of B).

"Essays" recursive abbreviations