Refers to the practice of a
corporation,
organization or
group ("
Silicon Graphics Incorporated") which is usually referred to by an
acronym,
abbreviation, or
shorthand ("
SGI") instead of its official
name, changing its
official name to match the
nickname (see:
SGI name change).
This recursive naming change is named for Silic- er, SGI, as they were the most prominent perpetraitors of it. Can also be loosely applied to products originally named normally and referred to with a meaningful acronym ("Personal Home Page", "Portable Network Graphic") changing their official name to one of those ridiculous recursive acronyms ("PHP Hypertext Preprocessor", "PNG's Not GIF". See: jargon file disorder).
The College Board pulled an SGI a few years back, when they officially changed the name of the Scholastic Aptitude Test to just be "The SAT". ("It's not scholastic, it doesn't measure aptitude, and it's not even really a test! Hell, we don't know what it is anymore!")