Subject: Re: WC:>: pronunciations



>While we have Mike on the subject <G>.
>
>My dog-earred UNIX manual says that Daemon is an acronym for Disk,
>Access, and Extension Monitor.
>
>Myth or not?


proably true.. OTOH, the FTP archive searching utility is known as
"Archie", and (purely by coincidence) the gopher equivalents are:

  Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives  
  (Veronica)

and:

  Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display
  (Jughead)


other questionable entries include:

  the filesystem checking utility
  (fsck)

  the Computer Oracle and Password System
  (COPS)

  the Security Administrator's Tool for Analyzing Networks  or:
  (SATAN)
  the Security Administrator's Network Testing Analyzer 
  (SANTA.. for the squeamish)

  Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle
  (which is disputed by the guys who founded Yahoo! themselves)

and:

  Practical Extraction Reporting Language   or:
  Pathalogically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
  (both officially sanctioned by Larry Wall)


hacker etymology is a very tricky field, because language is a hacker's
favorite toy.   contractions are an especially difficult field, because
there's no way to distinguish an acronym (the concatenation of the first
letters of a commonly-used phrase) from a retronym (an arguably
plausible expansion of a cool character series, like VIPER) after the
fact.   there's a certain Humpty-Dumptyism among hackers when it comes
to language:

   "when I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to, neither
    more nor less!"