A linguistic plague. Yup.

Five Thirty Eight has a new post on "The most powerful special interest in Washington: The acronym". A post that starts with this is terrifying, at least to linguists:

A linguistic plague is creeping through the nation’s capital.  ... In Washington, there is nowhere to hide from … the acronym. And the English language may not survive the scourge.

But the post is by Micah Cohen and  I trust him to make that worthwhile. And I'm way more terrified:

There’s Representative Michele Bachmann’s Many Individual Conservatives Helping Elect Leaders Everywhere PAC (MICHELE PAC).

There’s Senator Rand Paul’s mind-boggling Reinventing a New Direction PAC (RAND PAC). Mr. Paul, if a direction has already been invented, how can it be new?

Seriously? I don't even have the heart to post a lame pic with this. Sigh. Doesn't matter what it meant, it's just forcing some acronym. Seems Hardly Inspirational, This.

Update, Sunday morning: Catching up on the Twitter feed, I see that Ben Zimmer had this topic covered ... here. I confess to not having know the term backronym.