Talk about backronyming.
Man I love government acronyms. They never cease to make me smile. I tried my hand at one once. mk and I were responding to a grant call that was referred to as EUREKA, which stood for Exceptional Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration (can one accelerate knowledge? Is that a question that I even need to ask?). Our proposal revolved around trying to use bone marrow cells from young rats to extend the life of old rats. With that in mind, and their stupid 6 letter, reverse engineered, tortured acronym, I set out to make an even more tortured 7 letter acronym. The best I could do was BATHORY, which stood for Bone marrow Autologous Therapy Helping the Old Regain Youthfulness. BATHORY refers to Elizabeth Bathory, a late 16th to early 17th c. Hungarian countess who used to kill her hand maidens for--among other reasons--the purpose of bathing in their blood, as she thought that the blood of young girls could help her stay young and beautiful herself. I doubt anyone on the review committee was clever enough to run a Google on Bathory. Needless to say the grant was laughed out of the building (at us, not with us), and then two years later some jagoff Frankenstein sewed a young mouse to an old mouse and was all over the science headlines for being a genius.
I hope you're wrong about nobody getting the reference but I suspect you're right. I knew it immediately. My own brush with backronyms were pig launching stations. Really, they're called "pigs" because they're about the right size and they squeal. But somebody had to try for "Pipeline Inspection Gauge". Within the industry it's a lot more prosaic. "What's this thing on the drawing labeled 'pig launcher?'" "That's the pig launcher." "What's it for?" "Launching pigs." "..." "ever wondered how you clean a sewer line?" "...no, actually. You clean them with launched pigs?" "It's not a real pig." "It's a fake pig?" "Pretty much." "That you launch?" "At about 250 PSI, yeah." "Damn." "Yeah."
My favorite government acronym is CoC, pronounced "cock". It's a HUD term. It means "Continuum of Care", and can actually refer to several different things, but we'll say they're the geographic areas HUD divides the country into for distributing funds for simplicity. People talk about their CoC all the time. They brag about having a large CoC. They brag about the number of people their CoC has serviced. There is an annual CoC performance review report. It creates an unending stream of comedy. There was also HPRP, "Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Rehousing", whose pronunciation was never clear but "herpes" was a popular choice around here.
From what I understand those cancellation fees are rising to deter business passengers from buying economy seats and cancelling the flight, instead of them buying the more expensive but flexible business tickets. While this act would help regular folk' not pay a heap of money not to fly, I can only see this putting more business customers in economy because to them, a $50 cancellation fee is totally worth the ticket price difference.