Three Letter Acronym - References in Popular Culture

References in Popular Culture

• As early as 1967, the musical Hair included the song "Initials", whose final verse consisted only of TLAs, viz: "LBJ IRT USA LSD. LSD LBJ FBI CIA. FBI CIA LSD LBJ."
• In 1986, Will Shatter of the band Flipper formed a band named "Any Three Initials" (A3I), as a parody of the preponderance of hardcore punk bands with three-initial names.
• In 1998, the British band Love and Rockets released their last album, Lift, featuring the song "R.I.P. 20 C." that, apart from the refrain, consists only of three-letter abbreviations. A contest was held rewarding the first person to correctly give the meanings of all 69 of them.
• In 1999, German hip-hop group Die Fantastischen Vier (The Fantastic Four) released the song "MfG" ("Mit freundlichen Grüßen", German for "Best regards", literally "With friendly greetings"), also mainly consisting of TLAs.
• In 1999, the author Douglas Adams remarked: "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for."
• In 2001, Portland Oregon songwriter Craig Carothers produced a song entitled "BFD" which includes many three-letter acronyms throughout the lyrics. It has been recorded by Carothers as well as Kathy Mattea, Berkley Hart and Don Henry.
• According to the Jargon File, a journalist once asked hacker Paul Boutin what he thought the biggest problem in computing in the 1990s would be. Paul's straight-faced response was: "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms."
• The Jargon File also mentions the abbreviation "ETLA" for "extended three letter acronym" to refer to four letter acronyms/abbreviations. Also, "extended three letter acronym" is sometimes abbreviated to "XTLA".
• The ska band TLA from Dunedin, New Zealand, uses "TLA" to mean "two-letter acronym".