I am part of an organisation called the LAAC, which is the LVK Academic Advisory Committee. The LVK is the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration. LIGO is the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory, and Laser is Light Amplification from Stimulated Emission of Radiation. So the L of LAAC is a 5th order initialism...

It makes you want to address a paper to:

Light Amplification from Stimulated Emission of Radiation Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory-Virgo-Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector Academic Advisory Committee.

It's like looking at the preprocessor output from some template heavy C++ code.

Reminds me of

GTK which stands for GIMP Toolkit where

GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program where

GNU stands for GNU is Not UNIX where

UNIX stands for Uniplexed Information and Computing System

And on top of that there is a variety of software built on GTK whose names are acronyms containing a G that stands for GTK.

By now the word laser is so common that it is a just an uncapitalised word accepted by major dictionaries [1][2]. There are also inflections (lased, lasing) [3]. Nobody spells it in all caps now. Likewise with radar and soon lidar.

[1] https://www.lexico.com/definition/laser

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laser

[3] https://www.lexico.com/definition/lase

It's since entered the vernacular as just "laser".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laser

We've even backformed a verb, "lase".

English does whatever the hell it wants, doesn't it

You know what gets me though? When they say “laser” (however capitalized) in sci-fi stories that are set in a different universe...

Or any other terms that specifically evolved in Earth societies and cultures, like “katana” in Dungeons & Dragons and so on.

> any other terms that specifically evolved in Earth societies and cultures

That's true (pretty much by definition) of literally every word in English, though. (Yes, "katana" is a english word; the fact that it's derived from a japanese word (namely "刀" aka "かたな") doesn't change that, any more than "pizza" (italian) or "beef" (french, a long time ago).)