U Better Sell
Reader suggestions for renaming UBS.
Read more about Wall Street's ongoing crisis.
In yesterday's column on the plight of Swiss bank UBS, I asked readers to submit more apt definitions for the bank's acronymic name, which stands for Union Bank of Switzerland. And respond they did, with dozens of entries. Slate's crack Acronym Sorting Squad waded through the submissions and is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 UBS Alternate Naming Contest:
Most popular (and said to be commonly used on Wall Street):
U Be Screwed
Best uses of "U" as a pronoun:
U Been Swindled
U Better Sell
U Bought Schlock
Most obvious uses of UBS's last two letters for the barnyard epithet:
Underwater Bulls***
Unadulterated Bulls***
Unrepentant Bulls*** Spreaders
Ubiquitous Bulls*** Shills
Longest:
Unregulated Banking Sucks (the Life out of an Economy)
Best uses of "ululating":
Steve Jobs’ Dream Device Has Arrived, and It's Made by Microsoft
Texas Judge Blocks Lesbian Couple From Living Together
A Huge Discovery About Prime Numbers—and What It Means for the Future of Math
Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com and follow him on Twitter. His latest book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, has just been published in paperback.