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.