Certainly sounds plausible. Most of the time the first thing I do after I log in to a terminal is "cd work." And if I blundered that on a french keyboard at some point it might pop into my head as a funny thing to name a project.
I can't imagine there were lots of AZERTY keyboards kicking around MIT?
Maybe a French or Canadian person typed it wrong often and complained about the weird location of the w. Don't think it is the reason but there are more than one way to explain there lines of thought.
No québécois would be caught dead with an azerty layout.