From: wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr)
Subject: Re: DWD Question: "FOWL" and "SHUSH"
Organization: Northeastern Law, Class of '93
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 12:07:34 GMT


In article <yTkVRB1w164w@kretin.infoserv.com>, 
agent99@kretin.infoserv.com (Wendy Lee) said:

> Okay, so now we know what T.H.R.U.S.H. stands for.  What about U.N.C.L.E.?

Either "United Network Command for Law Enforcement" or "United Network
Command for Law and Enforcement."  One of the books had the latter,
along with either Napoleon Solo or Ilya Kuriakin explaining to some
civilian how that "and" meant that UNCLE really had a _lot_ more
latitude in its actions than most people realized.  In any event, the
first two letters did _not_ stand for "United Nations," as a lot of
people thought.

Now let's see if I can't kill off this thread entirely... On "Get
Smart," it was never implied that CONTROL was an acronym.  I think I
vaguely recall one episode where the head of KAOS (not Siegfried, by
the way; either Bernie Kopell wasn't available or this was before they
introduced the character) was standing in front of something that
looked like an official KAOS seal and that _might_ have had four words
on it that started with K, A, O and S, but the actor blocked the
camera's view of what it said :-(.

In the James Bond series, Bond's own agency was, of course, Her
Majesty's Secret Service, or possibly M.I.6 (Division 6 of the
Ministry of Intelligence, I believe).  The Soviet spy agency Smersh
(which, I think, Ian Fleming lifted from a more prosaic real-life
Soviet agency) wasn't an acronym; it was a phonetic derivation from a
longer Russian phrase that translates roughly as "Death to Spies" (one
assumes that the implied meaning was "Death to _Enemy_ Spies";
otherwise the organization would probably have had _really_ high rate
of personnel turnover :-).  SPECTRE (note the British spelling), the
free-lance evil organization that was Fleming's own invention, stood
for something like "SPecial Executive Committee for Terror, Revenge
and Extortion."  I like THRUSH better myself (and no, despite frequent
rumors about Ian Fleming's involvement in the creation of "The Man
From UNCLE," when all the smoke cleared Fleming had virtually nothing
to do with the project other than the clear thematic inspiration and
the contribution of the name of a minor and deceased gangster from one
of his books: Napoleon Solo).

And that should about cover it... now let's get back to Disney
Afternoon.  (Oh yeah, in one or two episodes of "My Favorite Martian,
Tim O'Hara and his Uncle Martin had run-ins with the evil organization
CRUSH; nobody ever said that it stood for anything, though.)
-- 
William December Starr <wdstarr@athena.mit.edu>

  We have then the two incidents in France followed by O'Neill's
  testimony of petitioner's changed condition in 1919 and its
  continuance until 1922. ...  Then follows a chasm of eight years.
  The only evidence we have concerning this period is the fact that
  petitioner married his present legal guardian at some time within
  it, an act from which in the legal sense no inference of insanity
  can be drawn.
               -- Supreme Court Justice Wiley B. Rutledge, majority
                      opinion in "Galloway v. United States" (1943)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.disney.afternoon