Band Of America has since become a snake too: "BOA", and Washington Mutual: "Wamu"...The subject of pronouncing acronyms as words generally bugs me, too, as most names don't need to be so long that we have to substitute a bunch of letters. There are banks and telecommunication companies out there of which people probably don't even know the full name, and the mish-mash of letters itself is not pronounceable either. The Bank of Montreal has somehow become the BMO, pronounced Bee-Moe: I thought that they'd moved their head office to Missouri.
It baffles me that companies with rock-solid sounding names choose to become cutesy acronyms: The Steel Company of Canada became STELCO, Dominion Foundries and Steel Company became DOFASCO, and Northern Telephone and Telecommunications became NORTEL.
One that really bothers me is from the steel industry, where the basic oxygen furnace became a BOF, but almost not one steelworker could pronounce it Bee-Oh-Eff: instead we got Boff or Bawf wall1 . What a bunch "off" illiterates.:-D One that I do accept (but only 'cause they slipped it past me) is SCUBA.
Wayne
It's pronounced "Can-Am".How about this one "Bombardier ".
I saw a film about him on sate-lite TV, a very interesting biography, and perhaps the only time in the world the name was pronounced correctly, or you would think as his family helped write it.
Charlie

Its... Bom-bar-de-yay (close)...