I never heard that one before. I thought Linux was just a conflation of "Linus" and "Unix", while GNU was a recursive abbreviation of "GNU is Not Unix".

Linux means "Linus's Unix" and the name came from the sysadmin at funet.fi who had to give the kernel a home subdirectory when Linus asked him to host the kernel on an FTP site ..

I think you're confusing Linux with GNU.

(I'd just like to interject, etc.)