Wednesday, March 5

Bacronym of the week

First in a series of one... Bacronyms are very common in science and industry, where you invent something and then try and think of a tortured phrase to describe it that gives a clever acronym.

A report on the BBC News about the invention of a method for cleaning water, using a byproduct of the whisky distillery industry, is a good example of this. The researchers at Aberdeen University, tipping the hat to the contributions from the Glenfiddich distillery, have given their invention the tortured title "Device for the Remediation and Attenuation of Multiple pollutants". Ugh. Sounds horrible. Why would they use such a horrible phrase? Because the acronym is then... Dram.

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