GNU famously stands for “GNU’s Not Unix,” a recursive acronym born from Stallman’s stubborn sense of humor. But GNU/Linux isn’t alone: Unix culture is littered with tongue-twisting recursive acronyms—Wine (“Wine Is Not an Emulator”), PHP (“PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”), YAML (“YAML Ain’t Markup Language”), and countless others. Stallman’s joke spawned an entire subculture of tech humor built around linguistic loops. Today, recursive acronyms thrive mostly as in-jokes, torturing newcomers and delighting Unix greybeards who love nothing more than watching fresh admins squirm through linguistic confusion.
