FLASH

[kevin at limits.org]

On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, pynchon-l-digest wrote:
> The five bells, not to mention the "flash" (as in "news"), seem to have been 
> journalistic practice as well.  Five bells from the teletype for urgent 
> incoming news.  But I'm having a hell of a time discerning if there's an 
> acronym of some sort involved here.  The capitalization would seem to imply 
> it, but ...

It's in all caps because it comes from a teletype machine.  The apocryphal
story is that the teletype engineers, given the choice between doing
everything in lowercase or everything in uppercase, decided that lowercase
was easier on both the eyes and the machine.  They were overruled by
management on the grounds that, without uppercase letters, one could not
properly write "the name of the deity."

Anyway, FLASH isn't an acronym for anything.