Last night, my wife asked:

“How did Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae get their names?”

My wife, god bless her, thinks I am a repository for all things trivia – and I like to indulge this fantasy of hers, but to tell the truth, I had no idea and had always wondered.

I told her I didn’t know, but I suspected that they were private companies at one point which the founder unimaginatively named with their children’s names.

I decided I needed to know the real answer to this, so I checked on Wikipedia. Interestingly, both of these names, although now official, were originally just liberal nicknames formed from the organizations’ acronyms:

“The name “Fannie Mae” is a creative pronunciation of the company’s acronym, FNMA (Federal National Mortgage Association), that has been adopted officially for ease of identification. It is more than an informal nickname; FNMA refers to itself by this name.”

Freddie Mac, it seems, desperately sought to follow in the cutsey name origins of Fannie Mae, as it doesn’t even make much logical sense, given its acronym is FHLMC (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation).

Sallie Mae is the nickname of SLM Corporation (Student Loan Marketing Association Corporation). These are the folks for whom you stood in endless lines in college.