Jeffrey Borinsky wrote:

> The Columbia Graphophone Co. and the Gramophone Company merged in
> 1931 to make Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI).  Apart from
> both companies having factories in Hayes, Middlesex, was there ever
> any connection between EMI and Aeolian?

Musical TLAs (three-letter acronyms) make for fascinating trivia.
It would be a fun diversion to try to compile a compendium of them.
I wonder how many customers of EMI, RCA, BMG, HMV, and the like,
ponder to think of where all this alphabet soup came from?

Given that most corporate identities are now formulated using market
surveys and focus groups, with aggressive intentions to avoid meaning
anything specific but with numerous allusions, these truncated identi-
ties probably just fade into the background noise of bizarrely coined
portmanteau words and seemingly random bursts of punctuation.

My 'favourite' example of a ludicrous corporate name?  "Inprise",
formerly Borland International, the maker of some pretty respectable
software tools in their early days.

-- Colin Hinz (whose identity seems to include inappropriately
complex sentences  :)