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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

There's something about three-letter words with an A in the middle that make people assume they're acronyms. HAM and MAC (as in, Macintosh) are often incorrectly written that way. It's weird.

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Medium Access Control (MAC) here in the protocol mines we use it pretty frequently

Also Mandatory Access Control.

And Message Authentication Code

And Macintosh Apple Comouter

An O appears to be a similar trigger. Our building manager persists in announcing the security tokens thus, as in, "Your new key FOB is ready.", and I feel real pain every time.

Just imagine saluting them and responding, “Very well; that will be all for now, Lieutenant. At twelve o’hundred we will head outside the wire.”

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

GotoBLAS always gets me. Named after the developer, Kazushige Goto.

Things unexpectedly named after people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888725

Also ELO ratings for chess (named after Dr. Arpad Elo).

Whenever I say Elo out loud, it takes a lot of mental energy to not say E-L-O, as if I'm talking about the Electric Light Orchestra.

Mac might be a word, but MAC, MAC, and MAC are all acronyms, to say nothing of the cosmetics brand MAC (styled as M•A•C, though not M.A.C., and remains a word, not an acronym or initialism).

Mac is a valid abbreviation of the Macintosh, which is named indirectly after John McIntosh, a Canadian farmer and apple breeder of Scottish descent, who gave his name to the McIntosh Red cultivar. Scottish artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh was also born McIntosh but revised his family name after a spelling error at the Glasgow School of Art. The Mackintosh that you wear is similarly misnamed after Charles Macintosh (no relation), inventor of the modern waterproof raincoat. And so it goes.

LUA is the one that annoys me the most, its a word. Its moon in portugese

Or my boss letting us know there will be a TEAMS meeting.

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