I suppose you were Absolutely too tired to attempt humor, then.
To be fair, I can get literal-minded when it comes to correcting an error. I once launched into a rather long post on the cardinality of transfinite sets because someone made a bad joke.
Minor nit: PCV stands for positive crankcase ventilation, so PCV valve is not redundant.
initech’s got it right. CGI was a way to differentiate from CG. CG or Chyron or Key/Keyer are terms used for the apparatus/software that supers graphics over images.
Wow, color me informed, thanks all 
. I had really thought it was a case of “longer acronym makes me sound smarter” syndrome that the public was dealing with.
Just for archiving purposes, I always knew CGI to be Computer Graphics Interface, long before it was used for Computer Graphic Imagery.
The later reference didn’t come in to use until the mid-90’s.
I believe it was the Devil’s DP Dictionary that mentioned “many organizations try to get by without a full-time acronymicist. This is a false economy.”
There are too many TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms).
I figure since this post was made, several more major sea changes in how server-side web scripting is done have come and gone.
And PIN stands for Personal Identification Number, so Personal Identification Number number?
And “VGA Adapter” is not redundant, because the A stands for…
Array.
Or at least, it did when IBM first created the VGA standard, accompanying the long-forgotten PS/2 line of computers. They ran OS/2! With Presentation Manager!
We can’t decide that one field can’t use an acronym that’s used in another unrelated field. Having two CGIs is not going to hurt anyone.
Though Pantone is trying to get people to stop referring to colors using PMS.
Red hasn’t been “PMS 185” for years. They’ve been calling it “Pantone 185”.
(One week a month they get really annoyed by it…)
<aside>
Why is it that people complain about “ATM machine” being redundant, but nobody ever notices that “ATM” is already redundant? You’d expect, what, an automated teller person? A manual teller machine?
Moderator Note
We ask that old threads in GQ only be bumped to add new factual information. Since most of the posts in this thread were opinion even 12 years ago when it was first opened, I’m closing this.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Perhaps with some very strong operant conditioning…
Another point is simply that the majority of TLAs now have multiple definitions. What do you think DDT means, for example?
So this whole thing of “It can’t stand for Blah De Blah because it stands for Bloop Da Bloop” is based on a flawed premise right from the start.
Plant’s Law: You know sometimes words have two meanings.
This is also true for acronyms.
Which is simply yet another case of polysemia. There’s no reason acronyms would be exempt from it, no other type of word is.
Yeah, at least one alternate meaning of ATM is rather unhygenic.
When I googled ‘polysemia’ I discovered that not only can the term refer to “the capacity for a sign (such as a word, phrase, or symbol) to have multiple meanings” but it can also refer to a genus of moth. 
I guess we could say that natural language parsing in inherently buggy in this case.
The whole initialisms and redundancy thing is silly.
It’s no more redundant to say “IBM machine” than it is to say “Sears machine” or “Wallmart machine.” “IBM” is taken as a whole. It’s the name of the company, the fact that those letters are initials is irrelevant. It’s the same thing for ATM machine, the “ATM” is taken as a whole; it’s a name, not a description. What the letters stand for has no significance, neither grammatically nor semantically.