A few years ago Arsenal was playing in an away Champions League match, and the BBC radio announcer was keeping an eye on the local TV feed. Early on in the match he noticed that in all of the stats graphics, Arsenal was being abbreviated as “Arse.”
I remember taking a class called “Analysis of Functions”, which students would gleefully refer to as “Anal Func.”.
Every night while I’m walking through the facility, I see all-purpose carriers full of First Class Mail, and I wonder to myself, “Why are so many of FairyChatMom’s mailpieces here?”
Oh, and whenever a memo gets distributed on email that discusses Point-of-Sale terminals, they spell “POS.” I read “Piece of Shit.”
Well, by standard abbreviation rules, this would have worked out as **CRP **or CREP. To make it creepy, the opposition party had to tweak the rules somewhat.
But all’s fair in love, war, and politics.
Not an acronym, but a homophone: my daughter’s a music student and I proudly told everyone she’d gotten an A in Aural Skills. :smack:
Not an abbreviation, but I desperately hoped that, although they were from different parties, politicians French Slaughter and Al Gore would run together on a presidential ticket.
I would totally have displayed a “Vote for Slaughter and Gore” bumper sticker with great pride.
Yeah, but what if Andy Dick goes into conservative politics? Would you as proudly campaign for Bush and Dick?
Would’t that be pronounced “OW-ral” rather than “oral”?
A few years ago I tried to get a translation project management product we were working on named:
Specialised Help Information Translation Project Organising Tool
But was found out. 
If you think that’s great, you’d love the bus system in Skagit County, Washington. Known in full as “Skagit Transit,” it has been officially abbreviated as “SKAT” since inception. The official website is www.skat.org. And yes, it is printed on all the buses!
We seem to have a thing here in Washington about giving transit systems unfortunate names, huh? A shame, though, that while I lived in Seattle when it was first installed, I have not yet had occasion to ride the SLUT. It’s on my to-do list. 
Merriam Webster lists both for aural, but lists “oral” first and uses it for the spoken example.
Awesome. You’re not a graduate of the South Harmon Institute of Technology, are you?
There was Operation Iraqi Liberation, which was changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom because everyone knows we were really only there to get the oif.
For five years, I was project manager of an education product for high school students called “H_______ (name of company) Online Essay Scoring”. One of our execs declared its acronym to be HOS, even though the full name was always written out as “H_______ Online Essay Scoring,” though I’m not sure that helped.
Well, one is an implement used to aid in the planting of seeds. The other is a garden tool.
The university I went to law school at had the Womyn’s Empowerment Action Coalition. It always struck me as funny that this group’s abbreviation is basically pronouced “weak.” But I’d gladly call them that all day with no hint of irony rather than type out that cringe inducing, eye rolling, bastardized version of “women” ever again.
I worked on a project a while back to launch an internal tool called the “Business Account Database”.
They eventually renamed it the “Business Database”, but by then it was too late… everyone still called it BAD until it was mothballed a few years later.
(I’m rather juvenile that way, though… I make Swedish Chef sounds whenever someone refers to Business Operations Readiness Testing, too)
jimm, if it makes you feel better, one of my friends actually pulled a very similar stunt, though he never really intended for it to go as far as it did. He was working as a code monkey at the time, and was asked if he could program a basic prototype that could be demoed to a client the next day. He banged something out in a couple of hours, then handed it in and went on with his regular life… until he got a panicked call from his manager a few months later, telling him that a client was experiencing lots of issues with the Serialised Historical Inventory Tracker.
Him: “The Serialised Historical Inventory Tracker? That’s just a prototype. The customer was never supposed to see it.”
Boss: “Well, you know how it goes.”
Him: “I don’t suppose you looked at the name all that closely, huh?”
Boss: “Ummm…” pause :smack:
It’s a wonder he managed to keep his job after that little incident.
We have a team of paralegals responsible for managing Supplemental Information Disclosure Statements. As a parent of an infant, I found it extremely difficult to discuss the “SIDS Team” (that acronym is more generally familiar to the public as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). My assistant and I have quietly rebelled by always referring to the documents as Supp. IDSs.
Happens to me too. Of course, our terminals are pieces of shit.
I write/edit for development agencies. Sometimes it’s good to spell out Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Sometimes you just have to let it go.
In the Canadian Forces when you are posted and are buying a house, you are entitled to an House Hunting Trip (HHT).
If you are getting a Residential Housing Unit (RHU), then a spouse is entitled to an Destination Inspection Trip (DIT).
But when the program started, it was called a Spousal Home Inspection Trip - SHIT
When I was in teacher college, the Physical Education folks used to bring in local special education kids for classes. They called it Adaptive Physical Education. They’d put signs up that said:
APE Lab, room 301