My favorite new recursive acronym has to be YOPY = Your Own Personal YOPY. It's recursive on the last letter. Of course, recursive acronyms with this rarer configuration require that the first and last letters be the same.

I notice that many of the recursive acronyms in the open source / free software department contain in their core the letters "IN" for the "Is Not", as in PINE Is Not Elm.

Of course some of these were not deliberate, such as the Amiga emulator, UAE, which was originally "Unusable Amiga Emulator" becuase of it's unstable nature, but then it got stable and was called Unix Amiga Emulator; but after being ported to windows and other OS's it was longer is confined only to UNIX, so many now call it the Universal Amiga Emulator, or for those who prefer a recursive form, simply the UAE Amiga Emulator.

MOMS Club
= Moms Offering Moms Support

From Crestline Courier-News, 2-22-01
The MOMS Club, with over 1100 chapters
nationwide, is a non-profit organization
designed to provide stay-at-home and
part-time working moms with a social
network for support and friendship.

Refreshingly non-geek, to say the least.
The above recursive acronym is sort of an accidental version of Douglas Hofstadter's "recursive variable" tato, which stands for "tato (and tato only)", and thus can be considered a recursive acronym as well.

Hofstadter uses tato as a tool for explaining the recursive powers of Lisp, and recursion and list expansion in general, in a couple of articles from his collection Metamagical Themas.

The idea is to substitute the phrase tato (and tato only) for every occurrence of tato thus:

n=0: tato
n=1: tato (and tato only)
n=2: tato (and tato only) (and tato (and tato only) only) 
n=3: tato (and tato only) (and tato (and tato only) only) (and
        tato (and tato only) (and tato (and tato only) only) only) 
and so on.
recursion = R = Red Book

recursive acronym n.

A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms/abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not EMACS") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU (q.v., sense 1) stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" -- and a company with the name Cygnus, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support" (though Cygnus people say this is a backronym). See also mung, EMACS.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

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