GE still calls itself General Electric Company and GM still calls itself General Motors Company.
Most of the major banks in Canada have done this, probably so that they don’t appear to have weird names when operating in elsewhere (ie, the USA). TD used to be Toronto Dominion, BMO was once the Bank of Montréal, and RBC was the Royal Bank of Canada.
I have no idea whether they’ve all officially changed their corporate names. They’ve all certainly gone out of their way to obscure their original names, for whatever reason.
There’s ASTM International, a standards body that used to be the American Society for Testing and Materials.
And ITT is no longer into telephones and telegraphs.
And LU (a French brand of cookies). That used to be somebody’s initials, as I recall.
And you forgot CIBC, formerly the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
For the Bank of Montréal, there was a debate in the early 1990s about getting rid of the city name because it didn’t sound, uh, Canadian enough. They were supposed to rename it First Canadian Bank… but there was no way to make a French version of that name. So eventually they just went with their ticker symbol, BMO.
I suspect most of the other banks went through a similar process. Like you said, expansion into the U.S. probably was a big factor: RBC is just obscure enough, whereas many folks in the U.S. would think the “Royal Bank of Canada” was Canada’s Fed.
Scuba?
Well, I do. American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Now how many of you know what EBCDIC stands for? Or COBOL?
That one I can’t remember, which is just as well, I guess. But I rarely programmed in it. Now if I could just remember what the C stands for in the programming language of that name…
I understand that DVD no longer stands for Digital Video Disk. I think it was officially orphaned about 10 or 12 years ago.
I’m not sure what annoys me more – that they insist on being called “beemo” "("BEEMO? REALLY?) or that my life with for the last several months has been complicated by moving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of accounts from Vancity (a local credit union) to “Beemo” and discovering that they simply don’t have the infrastructure in place to support our needs, and appear to be operating from an entrenched position circa 1995. ALL I WANT IS ONLINE STATEMENTS AND THE ABILITY TO ACCESS MY ACCOUNTS IN REAL TIME!
Nah, it’s probably the stupid name. I’ll just choke down some Kufk, chase it down with some Voh, and keep my tears to myself.
For some reason I can’t figure out, the original meaning of COBOL has always stuck in my brain as one of the useless bits of information I picked up somewhere and have never forgotten… even though I’ve never used it (the language or that bit of information). COmmon Business Oriented Language. I think I just thought it was cool, as a kid, that there was a language that claimed to be the one for “business.”
BASIC… I remember that the B was for Beginner’s. Didn’t remember the rest of that one, I guess, because it’s obviously not as cool an idea for there to be a language for beginners.
Having actually looked into that about a week ago, my understanding is that it was never “officially” that, or anything else, though “digital versatile disk” also had support.
According to this document, the DVD Forum Steering Committee in 1999 stated officially that as an international standard it’s just DVD:
That source, by the way, brings up another example: VHS
[quote=“dtilque, post:27, topic:573982”]
Well, I do. American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Now how many of you know what EBCDIC stands for? Or COBOL?
On this side of the pond, a lot of computer books and magazines in the 80’s replaced the American with All.
All Standard Code for Information Interchange. It makes no sense!
BASIC stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. I had heard that this was a backronym, but the Jargon File now says that was an error in previous versions.
C isn’t short for anything, it’s just named that for being a successor to B. B takes its name from something else (not ‘A’) but I don’t recall.
I’m pretty sure HSBC is an orphan, given that the British interest in the cities isn’t what it once was (it’s the erstwhile Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation).
BCPL, for Basic CPL. It was a language based on CPL, which stood for Combined Programming Language.
I think mp3 and USB still mean things, so they don’t count. Even MPEG (mp3 is actually MPEG layer 3) and JPEG still mean things. However, if you want to count them, you might as well add IEEE.
I know. I was just joking. B comes from the first letter of another language, BCPL, which according to Wiki, is short for Basic Combined Programming Language.
yay, I actually know something - MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group, or somethin’, I read somewheres…
PNC Bank is another. It was once Pittsburgh National Corporation technically, but did business as Pittsburgh National Bank and was known colloquially as PNB, locally. Mergers, acquisitions and so on brought us to PNC today.
Just because it still means something doesn’t matter, IMHO, if almost no-one (and by that I mean “the average person”) actually knows that the abbreviations mean.
I’d argue more people know that KFC means “Kentucky Fried Chicken” than know that USB means “Universal Serial Bus”. And I’d happilly ad IEEE to the list, too.
It applies to the airline and perhaps even the special forces as well.
It applies absolutely to Scandinavian Airlines (previously Scandinavian Air Service), but I would say that the Special Air Service still go by that name. The misnomer was intentional from the start.