I like calling these "anachronyms," because they're sort of like anachronistic acronyms (yes, fine, this one's _technically_ an initialism). I wrote a blog post[0] about them.
> yes, fine, this one's _technically_ an initialism
From the wikipedia article on acronyms[1], an initialism is a kind of acronym.
There are some definitions that specify that it must be pronounced as a word, although in common usage acronym includes initialisms , and what iteans to be "pronounced as a word" is kind of imprecise anyway. Is CIA pronounced as a single word, but the pronunciation comes from the pronunciation of the letters? I'd argue that it a single lexeme at least.
That's what I mean - that's how the parent defined an "anachronym". But yeah, there was that transitional phase where they first just redefined the acronym.
No, that's a media/journalist thing, companies themselves can do whatever. As far as I could tell (I worked at A(RM|rm) at the time, but not on this, no particular inside knowledge or anything) it may as well just have been to get people to stop saying 'ay-ar-em', since it was already not an acronym as said up thread; just a branding change, font change. In fact to your point in particular no you can tell it's not that, because note the 'a' is also lower case in the logo and anything styled.
Wikipedia calls these "orphan initialisms", with a couple of citations (halfway down the page for Acronym): "an existing acronym is redefined as a non-acronymous name, severing its link to its previous meaning." But yours is catchier.
Oh, I see they have "anacronym" too, with a fine distinction of meaning. It's the difference between the word officially ceasing to stand for anything, and the public generally forgetting the word stands for.
From the wikipedia article on acronyms[1], an initialism is a kind of acronym.
There are some definitions that specify that it must be pronounced as a word, although in common usage acronym includes initialisms , and what iteans to be "pronounced as a word" is kind of imprecise anyway. Is CIA pronounced as a single word, but the pronunciation comes from the pronunciation of the letters? I'd argue that it a single lexeme at least.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym