If you found it hilarious, well, that was the point: the words in the acronym are very un-denotative, so it encourages deconstruction to mean whatever the reader wants it to mean.
If I truly want people to understand what I'm talking about, rather than just make something popular, I don't give them evocative, fluffy slogans and then direct them to a dissertation to find out what the fluff really means. I use carefully chosen, denotative words in my slogan.
HATEOAS is a good example of prizing clarity over vague evocativeness. It's all about hypermedia, so hypermedia is in the acronym.
If I don't do this, I can't be too upset at what predictably ensues, as people take my cool-sounding slogans and repurpose them to legitimize their own ideas.
