Sunday, June 11, 2017

What is the second-worst acronym ever?



























Last night I was listening to BBC radio coverage about results from the snap election in the UK, where Conservatives did not secure a majority in Parliament. They were looking at a political deal with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland. The BBC spelled out the three letters D-U-P rather than pronouncing the acronym as a word that would sound like dupe - for which the Oxford Dictionary definitions are:

Verb - deceive; trick. Noun - a victim of deception.  

There is a web site for the Democratic Unionist Party at mydup.com. By the way, Wikipedia says DUP also is an acronym for Dances of Universal Peace and Daughters of Utah Pioneers.

On April 8, 2016 I blogged about What’s the worst acronym ever? It was ASSOL for the Antonin Scalia School of Law (at George Mason University) which thankfully was renamed to ASLS - the Antonin Scalia Law School.

The image was reworked from an 1895 Puck magazine cover of John Bull’s dilemma at the Library of Congress.

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