Fun with Acronyms in comic strips.
- Calvin and Hobbes played with this trope:Calvin: Our top-secret club, G.R.O.S.S. — Get Rid Of Slimy girlS!
Susie: Slimy girls?
Calvin: I know it's redundant, but otherwise it doesn't spell anything.- In another strip when Calvin and Hobbes had a fight, Hobbes threatened to quit the club and start his own. When Calvin said his club wouldn't have a "cool acronym" for a name, Hobbes said he'd call it C.A.D. (For "Calvin's a Dope". This, of course, made Calvin change the name of his club to "Hobbes is an ugly flea bag" and only made them fight more.)
- When Calvin appears as Stupendous Man at school, he tries to come up with a backronym for "STUPENDOUS" as part of his introduction, but S stands for "stupendous", he can't think of anything for "N", and he can't spell the last syllable of "stupendous" anyway.
- Dilbert spoofed this when the boss' secretary put "DOPE" on his business cards—unaware that he did in fact hold the title Director Of Product Enhancements.
- The boss was also tricked into putting an "e-" in front of his previous title acronym, DIOT (Director of Information, Operations, and Technology), because all the cool things these days have them.
- Interestingly enough, the new prefix is "i-".
- A variation: company e-mails are required to be the person's first initial and last name, causing complaints from an employee named Brenda Utthead.
- One of Dilbert's projects was named TTP, which stood for The TTP Project.
- A hidden one in Dykes to Watch Out For: It is not clear whether the Marriage, Order, and Family Organization actually uses its acronym.
- Eyebeam had the absurd megacorp TIC — "Three Initial Corporation".
- The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers once caught the attention of an ultra right-wing paramilitary group calling themselves the Americans Secretly Serving a Higher Order of Law Enforcement and Subservience.
- One FoxTrot strip featured a dish called STEAK in the high school cafeteria. The name was an acronym for "Squid Tentacles, Eggplant, And Ketchup."
- In another, Jason offers Peter a PB&J. Turns out the "J" in this case stood for jalapeños.
- In Get Fuzzy, Satchel's dog group is called Canines Against Traffic. Bucky suggests that a better title would be Dogs On Ridiculous Krusades.
- Possibly the Atlantic Research of Supernatural Entities Group.
- Also, Minks Against Yearly Being Eviscerated - one of the minks wanted to change this not-so-assertive name to MACHO, but as the other mink pointed out, "It doesn't stand for anything!"
- A more recent comic has Intelligence Department Institute Of The International Cathood.
- In the mid-1960s, Li'l Abner had Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything, or SWINE, an unsubtle parody of student radical groups.
- In a Sunday Pearls Before Swine strip, Pig meets a character named Ashley Stearns Simpson, with whom hw discusses FDR and JFK. A lot of readers didn't get it.
- In Retail, Marla thinks the annual Building Ultimate Salespeople policy test is a waste of everyone's time, but Stuart says the Building Ultimate Salespeople: Yearly Worksheet Of Rule Knowledge is very important.
- Scary Gary: Travis tells Gary that he is worried about catching covid, but Gary assures Travis that there is no way the head-in-a-jar will get covid. Then Leopold pops in to ask Travis if he is ready for his dose of Carnivorous Offensive Venomous Insatiable Dragonfish.
- In the early 1990s, when the World League of American Football (later NFL Europe) was starting, the comic strip Tank McNamara showed a group of executives upset that people were calling the league, "What-A-Laugh". One suit suggested changing the name to American World Football League, until he realized that this was just as AWFL.
