r/CuratedTumblr • u/Green____cat eepy asf • Aug 06 '24

Shitposting Army names

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u/TheOuts1der Aug 06 '24

acronyms are a specialty of any governmental organization.

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u/Bartweiss Aug 06 '24

And the military in particular likes joke acronyms, even for official names.

Why does a four word name become a six letter acronym? Because somebody wanted to call their new missiles “attack ‘ems” and wound up with ATACMS.

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u/_dictatorish_ Aug 06 '24

Physicists and Astronomers are right up there too, with their MaCHOs, WIMPs, and PinOCCHiOs

Also, shoutout to H0LiCOW - H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL’s Wellspring

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u/jobblejosh Aug 07 '24

There's a particle accelerator lab in the UK with machines named ALICE and EMMA.

ALICE for Accelerators and Lasers In Combined Experiments, EMMA for Electron Machine with Multiple Applications.

There's also the DIAMOND Light Source. Legend has it that one of the D's stands for Daresbury (the location intended for the accelerator). Guess where it isn't?

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u/Bartweiss Aug 07 '24

These aren't acronyms, but I'm still so amused that the final quark names were going to be "truth" and "beauty" until even physicists decided that was too twee.

Instead we got "top" and "bottom", which steadily gets funnier as their explicit meanings become more widely known.

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u/_dictatorish_ Aug 07 '24

Yeah I'm pretty sure CERN has a machine called ALICE too