Sneak is not a big fan of acronyms. In fact, he spent most of his early career in the IT industry with head buried in the web pages of Answers.com and Wikipedia, desperately trying to unravel the linguistic traps laid by some smart-arsed vendor or other. The only possible reason for acronyms seems to be to let pompous people sound even more self-important, Sneak thought. And in recent weeks, yet more have appeared.

E-business trade association Eema – whatever that stands for – has given birth to Stork, arguably the most pointless acronym ever invented. In fact, it’s not even worthy of acronym status. It stands for, wait for it, “Secure idenTity acrOss boRders acKnowledged". Huh? And hot on its heels, Secure Computing launched its brand spanking new security strategy – the Secure Web 2.0 Anti-Threat (SWAT) initiative. Given the type of person that revels in using these frequently meaningless linguistic oddities, maybe, SC should have substituted “Secure” for “Total”.