My base level reward for this is quite high. It’s tempered a bit by the use of VLSI, an acronym in itself that obviously hides a bunch of other words - an acronym inside an acronym is obviously untidy. The way I wanted to resolve that was by assessing whether VLSI is a common enough acronym that it functions as a word autonomously - like laser or AWOL or NASA - something that would largely not need explaining. Having asked around, I think it isn’t unless you are very much in the correct field - a slightly adjacent field is insufficient. So we’re landing somewhere in the middle. Score 3. Good effort.

Anything that isn’t war related would be 4+. Score 4; “VLSI”.

Score 4, good but the acronym in an acronym is abit jarring to me

There are a lot of key historical VLSI engineers. They’ve collectively been nominated for a lot of awards. And a mere nomination isn’t a very important event. Any one of those events fits the prompt, though, and it’s a pretty clean acronym barring the recursion issue. I’m feeling pretty firmly 2.5 on this, so I guess I’ll round up to Score 3 for the round’s difficulty.

I actually quite like this one despite the nested acronym, score 4

Changing to 5, both because I need a fourth number and because I really do actually like this one

Score 3 gets a point for being something kinda interesting, but “VSLI” is clunky and the event being the nomination and not the achievement also detracts

Score 3. Plausible headline in a technical journal, but “key engineer” is a bit of a vagueness.

(I really don’t get the anti-proper-noun perspective for a word game like this. If she’d literally been called Katelynn Enway, some players think it would still have made a better backronym to describe her as “Key Engineer”?)

It started as being anti-made-up names, for me - I think Mr. Eaton’s Skyline Arboreal Gardens was where it first came up. As this is the first round where the proper nouns have been largely real names I’ve been more open to them. I think it’s a bit of a difficulty thing. If you start with “King Edward V” then yes, very clever, you found the shortcut, but you’ve essentially made a three-word acronym rather than a five-word acronym, it just doesn’t deserve recognition at the same level as someone who sweated out a proper coherent acronym that uses the full scope of the prompt.

Score 3. The event is super interesting, but the acronym is kinda clunky.

*Backronym

I don’t mind nested acronyms. Score 4 for good effort and a non-violent entry.

This Backronym is now closed.

None of the words in the title of this Backronym included all the letters of any of the Buzzwords.

Chiiika gained 3 Points from the median Score.