This morning, I spotted a van from local plumbing company Chosen Rooter & Plumbing; painted on the side of their van was their logo:
They tease us by narrowly avoiding a naughty word in the acronym.
It reminds me of the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley (located not in Berkeley but in nearby Kensington). (I always assumed they chose their name to avoid the naughty acronym, but Wikipedia says they really were founded in Berkeley and moved to Kensington many decades later.)
I want a word for these carefully-avoided acronyms. If they were carefully-avoided initialisms,* we might call them initialisn'ts. Hmm. NANAs is cute and a fine acronym for Naughty Acronyms Narrowly Avoided. But it would be better if "nana" itself were almost-but-not-quite a naughty word. Hmm.
*You, of course, remember that initialisms are pronounced spelled out, e.g. DNA; while acronyms are pronounced as words, e.g., SCUBA.
