Last week, George Mason University decided to honor late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (and get $20 million from an anonymous Scalia admirer) by renaming the law school the Antonin Scalia School of Law. On Monday, somebody at the school either decided to take a look at the acronym, or perhaps read her Twitter feed. Officially, the law schools still retains its new original name, but on its website and promotional material, it's now called the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason — ASLS instead of ASSoL.
"A tentative but not finalized decision was made to nip the name-needling in the bud and rearrange the words," a "person familiar with the school’s internal discussions" told The Wall Street Journal. "A school spokesman declined to comment." The Journal's Jacob Gorshman suggests that "Justice Scalia, famous for his puckish sense of humor, would be amused" by the first acronym, and given that universities have marketing departments, maybe this has been an elaborate publicity stunt. Still, to use the name of a recently deceased eminent American jurist for something so crude, you'd have to be a real.... Oh.
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