Those people are known as CANOE = Conspiracy to Attribute Nautical Origin to Everything. No I didn’t make that bacronym up; some wag on another message board did.
“AWOL” may belong in that list. It dates from at least WWI, but may go back further. But it falls into a grey area between actual words and acronyms…
I wonder how they manage w/ my other favorite cold-related idioms. Witches and their mammaries are in short supply at sea, and you really don’t need anyone trying to dig a well either.
BOAC was the British Overseas Airways Corporation, so not like FUBAR or SNAFU.
NASA, and other space agencies are other culprits, things like MESSENGER MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging :smack:
Just calling it Messenger, like Voyager, or Pioneer, doesn’t cut it, apparently, being an actual rocket scientist is not enough and they have to come up with “clever” names to score some extra points.
Add to these the wonderful FAFFH.
Don’t take the bacronym literally. It’s just that there’s several bogus nautical etymologies out there, including of course, one for “the whole nine yrads”. I can’t remember off-hand what the others are.
I thought “pogue”, originally meaning “faggot”, now stands for Person Of Greater Use Elsewhere.
Airlines? Alitalia - Always Late In Takeoff, Always Late In Arrival.
An earnest young man once insisted to me that the name “Tony” originated at Ellis Island from all the immigrants showing up with notes saying “To NY” pinned to their lapels. The young man’s name was Tony, by the way.
Bug-eyed Useless Shit’s Ersatz Yet Insanely Stupid Mnemonics
I pried a flyer off my car this afternoon - a party called ICE.
Insane Cooler Experience 
Our local airline LIAT:
Late If A Tall
Luggage In Another Terminal
Love it! That’s the way to tamper with the language for best fit.
Ha! Now that’s clever. 
In something of the same vein, I’ve realized that I’m also irritated by people capitalizing things as if they were acronyms when they are not. Example that brought this to mind, sighted on rather old documents from ten to fifteen years ago: FAX.
At least they didn’t insert periods between the letters.
You keep using that word. I do not think you realize it’s a cutesy assemblage like you are complaining about and one that makes me grind my teeth whenever I see it. 
Relatedly, the “turtle” part of the East Side Manhattan neighborhood of Turtle Bay (where the UN is) is (probably) a corruption of the Dutch word “deutal”, meaning “bent blade”.
Steady - you’re sounding incoherent. 
A popular gag a few years ago was that the name of British building firm “Wimpey” stood for “We Import More Paddies Every Year”.
A well-known / notorious instance in the UK of this process, in the law-enforcement field: for a good many years, the country’s police forces have had at their disposal a wide-ranging computer system, to consolidate information regarding especially serious crimes: the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System – HOLMES. Clearly, the great detective’s name was chosen first, and the contorted title to fit the initials, thought up afterwards (“Large Major” !? – tautologous, or what?). A bit of whimsy which many in the police and outside it, find irritating.
A British thriller writer has indulged himself in a flight of fancy, by writing a short story in which the country’s criminal masterminds strike back by setting up a rival super-computer for their own purposes, named after Holmes’s arch-antagonist Professor Moriarty. The “backronym” here is, something like “Massively Ordering Reprehensible Information And Rot The Yard” (Scotland Yard, denoting in British “crime folklore” the headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police Service, and by extension, Britain’s police-detective establishment as a whole).
I learnt it as “Morte Alla Francia, Italia [something],” said to mean “death to the French, is the cry of the Italians!”
Pretty sure I read it in - of all things - a mid-90’s Swedish-language edition of the Guinness Book Of Records.
Sort of related:
Those “interesting” “facts” that people “know”.
This morning, I had to deal with a coworker who told me how the average person swallows 2-3 spiders a year in their sleep.
He couldn’t even form a coherent answer when I asked him who determined that, and how they did so.