Recently I saw a headline referring to the UK's intelligence service MI5. I was not interested enough to read the article itself but I was drawn into a bit of introspection. I realized I have a positive prejudice favoring MI5.
I need to qualify. My prejudice is not favoring the UK government sponsored domestic counter-intelligence service nicknamed MI5. My prejudice extends only to the nickname itself. There is likely a component which could, with far too much effort to justify, be traced back to various spy stories I have encountered. Another component is linked to the the sound of the acronym: Em eye five. Or better: emmmeyef ive. The voiced consonants flow together in a manner far different from the acronyms of similar agencies like eff be eye or sea eye ay, for example, or the semi-translated kay gee be. And then there is the mysterious numeral. This clearly denotes a simple ordinal (military intelligence secions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 as it once was) and yet somehow carrying a connotation of some unspoken reality touching the agency's secret mission.
The lack of clear definition which is inherent in all acronymic nicknames also plays on the sense of exclusiveness (or snobbishness) which appeals to all of us at some level.
Given the actual reality of secret security agencies one would like to avoid too much attachment to the nicknames of any of them, no matter the pleasantness and evocativeness of the nickname. I do not want to be perceived as a supporter of the real MI5 simply because I have warm feelings from the character sequence. So I wondered: Is there some other 3 character nickname which could be used, some character sequence without so much of the pre-existing baggage accruing from murder, theft, and violation as that carried by an official government security apparatus?
MI5 has the simple structure we might encode as [A-Z] + [A-Z] + [0-9]. The number of possibilities is 26 times 26 times 10 = 6760; not so very many but too many to analyze objectively on a hot summer afternoon when any mental exertion is too much. Still I felt energized enough to allow some of the possibilities to roll around in semi-consciousness: emmm, ummmy, errrg, ennnt, ennny, and so on.
At last -- last in actual reality because after this I stopped my consideration -- a plausible proposal rose into consciousness. What about NE1? This has some of the same auditory flow, some of the mystery of not denoting anything, commonly utilized letters to which words can be easily assigned in a reverse etymology, and the happy claim of being ordinally prior, while at the same time eschewing exclusivity entirely by allowing common access to all English language users.
Truly, in actual reality, this is a fictional acronym to which NE1 can be admitted.