[blooalien]

To a programmer or scripter, an uppercase $WORD starting with a dollar sign often denotes a variable. Thus, $WORK could denote any sort of work, or if you're religious, you might worship a $DIETY (but which one we don't know without asking, so it's "variable" information).

[pavlov]

Sadly this script that depends on a supreme being will probably break in production because the correct spelling is $DEITY...

I guess supernatural dependencies are frowned upon these days anyway.

[bradknowles]

I support ${DEITY}, to cover the use case when there isn't one.

[spicybright]

That's why I always put both $DEITY and $DIETY in my .bashrc file.