Back in June, I answered a reader’s question about “gnu,” which is another name for the “wildebeest,” a large and, some would say, exceedingly weird-looking African antelope. For those who may have missed the column, the word “gnu” is the name for the animal in the language of the Khoikhoi ethnic group of southwestern Africa, and is presumed to have been coined as an imitation of the gnu’s snort.
Shortly after I wrote the column, I received a friendly email from a reader, Christian McCusker, who pointed out that I had failed to mention an important use of the word “gnu,” namely that found in the moniker of the GNU/Linux computer operating system, often (although some would say improperly) simply called “Linux.” GNU/Linux, which is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to Microsoft Windows among personal computer users, is an “open-source” (i.e., not proprietary, as Windows and Apple’s OS X are) and free (as in “costs no money” as well as in “open to modification by anyone”) operating system known for its stability and security (making it largely immune to the viruses and spyware that plague Windows). There are literally dozens of varieties of GNU/Linux available, but I have used the Ubuntu version since I abandoned Windows in 2005 (one of the smartest things I ever did). “Ubuntu,” incidentally, is a word in the Bantu languages of southern Africa meaning, roughly, “humanity toward others.”
Meanwhile, back at “GNU/Linux,” the GNU Project to develop a free operating system was begun in 1983 by Richard Stallman, and has developed many of the components of the operating system. The core (or “kernel”) of the system, however, was developed in the early 1990s by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish university student at the time, and eventually dubbed “Linux” in tribute to its inventor.
The “GNU” part of the name is less straightforward but much more fun. GNU/Linux is usually described as a “Unix-like” system, Unix being an operating system originally developed by Bell Labs. But there are important technical (and legal) differences between Unix and GNU/Linux, so “GNU,” coined by Richard Stallman, is an acronym standing for “GNU’s Not Unix.”
That is clearly not a normal acronym, as acronyms usually don’t use the acronym itself as one of the words represented by the acronym, a strange form of tail-chasing that subverts the very idea of an acronym. Such “recursive” or “circular” acronyms appear, however, to be something of a tradition in the computer programming field, and a lengthy list of such creations can be found at Wikipedia.
Recursive acronyms are not solely the province of puckish wit in the computer field, however. The big bold letters on that VISA credit card in your wallet, for instance, actually stand for Visa International Service Association, making “VISA” itself pretty meaningless. I suspect that both Lewis Carroll and George Orwell would find “recursive acronyms” fascinating.
You ought to point out that in this usage, the ‘g’ is pronounced.