Perl has been said to stand for "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language" (by it's fans) or "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister" (by its detractors). In fact, Perl is not an acronym; it's a shortened version of the program's original name, "pearl", and when you're talking about the language it's spelt with a capital "P" and lowercase "erl", not all capitals as is sometimes seen (especially in job advertisements posted by contract agencies). When you're talking about the Perl interpreter, it's spelt in all lower case: perl.
Perl has been described as everything from "line noise" to "the Swiss-army chainsaw of programming languages". The latter of these nicknames gives some idea of how programmers see Perl - as a very powerful tool that does just about everything.