I always thought it was because OG hams had some sort of regional accent and would say hamateur.

oh maybe. There's maybe multiple stories, but none of them that I've heard involve it being an acronym.

It’s because amateur radio operators also enjoy Serrano ham.

There's something about three-letter words with an A in the middle that make people assume they're acronyms. HAM and MAC (as in, Macintosh) are often incorrectly written that way. It's weird.

Medium Access Control (MAC) here in the protocol mines we use it pretty frequently

Also Mandatory Access Control.

And Message Authentication Code

And Macintosh Apple Comouter

An O appears to be a similar trigger. Our building manager persists in announcing the security tokens thus, as in, "Your new key FOB is ready.", and I feel real pain every time.

Just imagine saluting them and responding, “Very well; that will be all for now, Lieutenant. At twelve o’hundred we will head outside the wire.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_forward_operating_base...

GotoBLAS always gets me. Named after the developer, Kazushige Goto.

Things unexpectedly named after people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888725

Mac might be a word, but MAC, MAC, and MAC are all acronyms, to say nothing of the cosmetics brand MAC (styled as M•A•C, though not M.A.C., and remains a word, not an acronym or initialism).

Mac is a valid abbreviation of the Macintosh, which is named indirectly after John McIntosh, a Canadian farmer and apple breeder of Scottish descent, who gave his name to the McIntosh Red cultivar. Scottish artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh was also born McIntosh but revised his family name after a spelling error at the Glasgow School of Art. The Mackintosh that you wear is similarly misnamed after Charles Macintosh (no relation), inventor of the modern waterproof raincoat. And so it goes.

Also ELO ratings for chess (named after Dr. Arpad Elo).

Whenever I say Elo out loud, it takes a lot of mental energy to not say E-L-O, as if I'm talking about the Electric Light Orchestra.

LUA is the one that annoys me the most, its a word. Its moon in portugese

Or my boss letting us know there will be a TEAMS meeting.

Yeah, it doesn’t stand for anything. It’s just a bunch of Highly Advanced Messaging.

it Hain't AM

Whoa: there's a fairly long WP article on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_ham_radio

Is WP a common abbreviation for Wikipedia? I usually just say wiki.

Wikipedia is a wiki, but only one specific wiki is Wikipedia

"WP" looks like WordPress to me.

I thought Washington Post

I am old enough to still see "WordPerfect"...from the 1980s.

Well, I am old enough to still see William Penn...from the 1680s.

You don't look a day over 200.

I'll have you know I learned typing in WP (word perfect) in the late 90's still.

(I guess they preferred typing on DOS based systems even though windows 98 was mainstream by then since it meant you couldn't alt-tab and lose focus or cheat somehow? IDK know. Maybe it was a licensing issue)

It's a common inside wikipedia itself. For example, WP:POV is used to link to the "neutral point of view" meta page.

I had always heard "Hertz, Armstrong, and Marconi". 73!

Interestingly that naming scheme is debunked on the adjacently-linked wikipedia page on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_ham_radio#Hertz%E...

I’ve been seeing it capitalized more and more over the past decade or so. It grates for me as well but seems to be getting more common.

It’s an easy way to tell that someone isn’t a ham tho.

Same for Mensa. I've never seen an actual member write MENSA but people who fake being members do it constantly. Think it might come from some of the organization's various wordmark logos being misinterpreted.

Probably capitalized by the HN's title auto-mangler.

TIL!!!!

Aw. I meant it in a good way...

Ok, we've downcased the AM above.