I'm sure everybody has seen or used the IBM notebooks with the little joystick button in the middle of the keyboard as a mouse substitute. Well, a computer journalist colleague of mine, the late Guy Kewney, was out to lunch with some very senior IBM marketing folks. During this they gave him a sneak preview of the new ThinkPad with this new little pointing device on it. They hadn't yet come up with a name for this device. Guy suggested one - "centrally located inertia-less tracker". The next day the IBM folks told Guy they were actually quite taken with this and started talking about using this as the official name. A few days passed. As people do, in preparing marketing materials they got to the point where it got abbreviated into an acronym. Guy got a phone call...
I was actually standing three feet away from Guy when he got that call. It took several minutes for him to recover from laughing before he could explain to me why he was laughing. To this day, I still call one of those by its initials.