A Trip to the Bundeswehr's Fantastic Defense Technology Museum in Koblenz, Part 5: Submachine Guns, Cont'd 2 [GUEST POST]

@iksnilol "At that time the code-name Rak was also born. Several urban legends are connected with that name, the most persistent of them making it an abbreviation from Ręczny Automat Komandosów (Commando Hand-held Automatic Weapon). The late Professor Stanisław Kochański, close associate and pupil of Mr Wilniewczyc, disputed the theory. The word “Automat” was used in Russia, at the times Mr Wilniewczyc studied small arms designing there during the WW1, and later on, up to this date (e.g. Avtomat Fiodorova, and later the Avtomat Kalashnikova, the AK), only for automatic rifle-class designs. Mr Wilniewczyc was famous for his terminological purism. He time and again have chastised his students and co-workers alike for such blunders, and so it is highly unlikely that he would ever call his work using the wrong term, as it was chambered for the pistol round. According to Kochański, the name Cancer could stem from two things. First, the cocked weapon was very unusually shaped for these days – it looked as it was positioned backwards, just like the ‘canard’ airplane flying the horizontal stabilizer first. In Polish language there is an expression ‘chodzić rakiem’, meaning ‘walking backwards’, like the cancer moves. The indirect proof that the name was used as a word – and not as an acronym – is Wilniewczyc’s own joking remark from the times, where he fought an uphill struggle against the terminal illness, that eventually killed him in December 1960. He is reputed to say then, that ‘Either the cancer is going to finish me first, or I would finish the Cancer earlier’, playing on the names of his gun and his illness.The cancer got the better of him on December 23, 1960. After his death, the Rak design team with Marian Wakalski, Grzegorz Czubak and Tadeusz Bednarski took over the whole of design and started to perfect it."

http://www.forgottenweapons...

As far as I know, the "RAK" acronym is apocryphal, "Rak" is the actual name of the weapon, and "PM" is the designation. Like Ian says, this is supported by the fact that what "RAK" supposedly stands for makes no sense.