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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

A university in the UK (Portsmouth?) hired an expensive creative agency to come up with a new name. They whittled it down to three options:

* University of Portsmouth

* The University of Portsmouth

* Portsmouth University

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The reason I'm not allowed in polite circles is after they present those 3 options, I'd laugh, compliment the great joke and ask them when the real presentation was going to begin.

Yeah, so a couple years back the "Technische Universität Berlin" rebranded to "Berlin Universität der Technologie" or Berlin University of Technology. Because they thought that would be more similar to e.g. MIT and the like. Of course the abbreviation then would be BUT... Thankfully it did not stick and they are back to Technical University of Berlin.

In 2006, the University of Karlsruhe rebranded (for the same reason) to Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), aping MIT.

> Because they thought that would be more similar to e.g. MIT

Why would a superficial similarly to "MIT" be any be useful?

Any potential student should be able to look past that.

I guess it got reverted pretty quick, the only search result for "Berlin Universität der Technologie" is your post here.

See https://www.pressestelle.tu-berlin.de/newsportal/internation...

Guess it was for English only

ah, and that explains why I didn't find it looking for the English either. It was "Berlin Institute of Technology"

Is "pee ew" a slang interjection indicating that something stinks in British English like it is in American English?

Always got to watch those acronyms. Reminds me of back in the day when Oregon State started advertising its website on billboards. www.orst.edu. [1] Nobody in their marketing department managed to see that before the rest of the world quickly started making fun of it. They quickly rebranded to www.oregonstate.edu.

[1] Yes, that's not -exactly- an acronym

Orst for Oregon State is technically an acronym:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym

It's not an initialism, like IBM, but it is an acronym, like Benelux.

Would that have been in the early 90s when it was a polytechnic?

Yes, I can't remember if it was actually Portsmouth or one of the other polytechnics.

Middlesex Poly went through a similar, expensive process before becoming Middlesex University

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