Sadly, I can't edit the comment anymore. Here are a few more.
- German Chocolate Cake - Named after the English-American chocolate maker Samuel German.
- Baker's Chocolate (popular American brand of baking chocolate) - Named after Dr. William Baker
- Loop subdivision (CG term) - Named after its inventor Charles Loop.
- French Hill (neighborhood in Jerusalem) - Named after British general John French. (Disputed)
- Mobile Homes (my absolute favorite) - Named after their place of fabrication, Mobile Alabama. Bonus fact (mine): The product's original name (that sadly didn't catch on) was "Sweet Homes" after their inventor James Sweet! And The 1974 Lynyrd Skynyrd hit “Sweet Home Alabama” was a reworking of a 1951 radio jingle advertising “Sweet Homes, Alabama.”
The Mobile Homes one is a fake story made up by Snopes for their TRoLL section. It's not true. There was no business called Sweet Homes in Mobile, and the prefab housing industry did not originate there.
Manufactured houses really did grow out of the camper/trailer industry. The name "mobile home" is a holdover from when they had wheels. The first companies to deliver prefab houses to set on foundations already had thriving businesses making trailer-homes or other prefab structures (like those seen on construction sites)
Nachos are also named after a person - a maitre d' named Ignacio, who needed to come up with something to serve one night after his chef had already left). The word "Nazi" comes from the same root, a nickname for Ignatz used to make fun of Bavarian peasants.
According to Snopes, the song "Sweet Home Alabama" was actually inspired by a radio commercial for "Sweet Homes" that had aired decades earlier. Full circle.
You fell for a Snopes TRoLL. They made that story up. Mobile homes are called that because they can move. There was never a mobile home company called "sweet homes", and the industry does not originate in Mobile.
> So how did this claim arise? In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of “facts” that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous “facts,” among which was the statistic cited above about the average person’s swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst’s propagation of this false “fact” has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.
This is NOT in their "TroLL" section -- it is not clearly marked as being a fake fact.
This Snopes article cites a column reportedly called "Reading Is Believing" from a periodical called "PC Professional", page 71, date 7 January 1993. I was unable to find the existence of any such periodical although there is "PC professionnel", published in German, ISSN 0939-5822, whose archives seem to only be available in German libraries (and I have not reviewed those).
However, I was able to find in the Cornell University archives, a quarterly periodical called the Cornell Engineer, which carried a column by a student columnist dated April 1992 (Volume 56 number 2, page 24, column title "Stress and Strain", author Margot Anne-Stephanie Vigeant '94). That seems to predate the January 1993 citation given in the Snopes article, and the 1992 student-publication column text says in part
> My first topic for this issue is worries. I've decided that there are just too many well adjusted, un-paranoid people in this school (NOT), so I've decided to wreck their peace of mind by sharing a list of my favorite worries with them. These are the kind of things that just jump into your mind right before you're about to fall asleep - horrible little night gremlins whose goal it is to keep you up just a little bit longer. So here they are, hope you can sleep after this:
> The average person swallows eight spiders while sleeping, in their lifetime. What if all eight show up tonight?
Meanwhile the source that Snopes apparently made up, Lisa Birgit Holst, is an anagram for "This is a big troll".
It's just odd. Their debunking contains a pointless lie; there is a real citation available they chose not to use.
Millbrae, California (suburb of San Francisco-San Jose right next to SFO) is a conjunction of Mill and 'brae.' Mill refers to Darius Ogden Mills (at one point the richest person in California) who purchased the land in 1860 and brae is a Scottish word for "rolling hills". [1]
Longyearbyen in Svalbard (Longyear Town), the main settlement, is named after John Monro Longyear, an American coal magnate from Michigan [2].
From the IPA pronunciation guide of Oliver Heaviside's wikipedia page (mouse over the bit in parenthesis right after his name at the top of the page), "heavy side", with a slight emphasis on the first syllable of "heavy".
There is also a King Street in London's Hammersmith. The surprising bit is that, in a city full of places named after various monarch, it was named after bishop John King.
This doesn't belong in the category, since it's obviously a name. If it were called "Running Shoes" because the company founder was named "Running", then it would belong..
What's "Adidas" to you then? the examples show nouns or adjectives that turn out to be the inventor's name (like PageRank, you think it's from "web pages", but oh, it's from "Larry Page", or "Main Street", where you think it's because it's the primary street, but oh, it's actually named after a Mr. Main).
So what noun or adjective is "Adidas"?
I'm going to complain about being downvoted and I'm gonna grumpily say even HN isn't immune to anti-intellectualism...
It doesn't belong in the same way that Debian doesn't.
The good ones in the list are good because they are not obviously a name of a person, the name of the thing makes sense independently to it being named after a person.
"Lake Mountain" could easily be named that because it is a mountain with a lake, so it is interesting that Lake Mountain is named after someone named Lake; Adidas and Debian are unexpected simply because they don't look like the name of a person, or anything else!
Most of these are great. Taco Bell makes sense to me however - I didn't expect to buy bells there. If it had been named after a Melanie Taco or similar, THAT would've been notable.
My contribution: Lake Mountain in Victoria!
"There is no lake at Lake Mountain, the area was named after George Lake, who was the Surveyor-General of the area including the mountain."
I had always assumed the bell managed to reference both a dinner bell (food) and a mission bell (California, with its Hispanic population, hence Tex-Mex). I'm blown away it's just the founder's name.
Tex-Mex is from Texas... that's what the Tex part is, and it's distinct from Cali-Mex, because while both cuisines originated from Mexican influence into the area using local ingredients and traditional techniques, the ingredients were different and the influences originated from different regions of Mexico which heavily influenced the cuisine. Tex-Mex originated with the Tejanos who resided in Texas while it was still part of Mexico and mostly originated from Central and Northern Mexico while Cali-Mex is predominantly a result of immigration that occurred later on mostly from Western/Coastal Mexico.
Tex-Mex and Cali-Mex aren't the same thing, and California has no claim to Tex-Mex...
I've never heard the term Cali-Mex, but I'd say that Taco Bell is way closer to Tex-Mex than any other taco places in SoCal, which are generally much more authentic.
Taco Bell isn’t Tex-Mex, it’s corporatized and white-washed fast food. You won’t find Tex-Mex in California... that’s kind of the point.
I appreciate many different cuisines, so I am not saying Tex-Mex is better than Cali-Mex, just that they’re different. Bringing Taco Bell into the equation and saying it’s representative is deeply insulting to Tex-Mex, however.
I don't believe it would have been called Taco Smith. It happened to be that the dudes last name made sense in the context of a dinner bell being rung for tacos.
That really isn't similar in terms of usage. "Taco John" is a person's nickname. (And then, Taco John's is just the place that belongs to Taco John.) But you wouldn't call someone by their last name.
You're going to have to elaborate. What nickname do you see in "McDonald's" or "Hardee's"? What do you mean by "worked out fine for Julius"? You are aware that Julius Caesar's surname was "Julius", right?
OK, well, I am taking cognomen as surname, as is common when referring to him today, by nomen + cognomen. Never met the man or had the joy of calling him Gaius.
There are modern people today with a surname of Caesar. Somehow, the name of the late celebrity Sid Caesar pops up for me. Wikipedia has more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_(surname) -- and I know of other languages where their cognate for Caesar is also a surname.
But yes, it is common to address people by their last name as a nickname. I seem to recall it was especially common back in school, something guys did kind of informally. Plenty of reasons explained here: https://www.google.com/search?q=call+someone+by+last+name
I also recall nickname variations of various surnames. Somebody called Fitzgerald might be called Fitz. Somebody called Smith might be called Smitty. Those are two I recall from school days.
And yes clearly, McDonald's and Hardee's are named for surnames.
> I am taking cognomen as surname, as is common when referring to him today, by nomen + cognomen.
Huh? "Caesar" is how he's generally referred to, almost certainly because the form of address to every Roman emperor was "Caesar", after him. But there's no indication that it is taken to be his surname. That would be ridiculous.
There is no pattern for the common English name of a Roman figure:
- Virgil: nomen
- Ovid: nomen
- Martial: cognomen
- Catullus: cognomen (of possible note: Martial and Catullus have the same nomen)
- Cicero: cognomen, but sometimes referred to by nomen as "Tully"
- Antony: nomen
- Brutus: cognomen
- Pliny the Elder: nomen
- Catiline: cognomen
It's purely convention whether they're known by surname or personal name.
Similarly, what are the surnames of, as they are known in English, Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek, or Sun Yat-sen?
I can respond to the rest of it. I wanted to know where the idea that it's common to view the cognomen as a surname came from. It's bizarre.
> There are modern people today with a surname of Caesar. Somehow, the name of the late celebrity Sid Caesar pops up for me. Wikipedia has more
Not really relevant when the claim was that (1) Little Caesars is named after someone's surname; and/or (2) Caesar was Julius Caesar's surname. Both of those claims are obviously false.
> yes clearly, McDonald's and Hardee's are named for surnames.
But I've been saying this whole time that "Taco Smith" is not similar to "Taco John's", because "Taco John's" is named after a notional owner, Taco John, whereas you couldn't call someone "Taco Smith". (And of course, even if you did, you wouldn't expect the restaurant to have the same name as the owner.)
McDonald's and Hardee's are not evidence that anyone ever referred to anyone as "McDonald" or "Hardee". They're names, not nicknames.
> But yes, it is common to address people by their last name as a nickname. I seem to recall it was especially common back in school, something guys did kind of informally. Plenty of reasons explained here: https://www.google.com/
This isn't common at all. What country are you thinking of?
A double twist is that in the original Hungarian his name is Élő that means "Live". For the first few decades of hearing "Élő"-score, I just assumed it meant your "live" score, as in your score at the current time. I wonder if others had that confusion too.
My favourite is the Heaviside function [1], which is named after Oliver Heaviside [2], who just happened to have an appropriate name for a function with one heavy side!
Sadly not quite in the same vein, but the Killing field seems rather vicious until you know it's just named after Wilhelm Killing. (EDIT: Sorry, I didn't notice klyrs mentioned it 2 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890735 .)
I don't have a clue about the math, but I liked the puns in the preface to Knuth's "Concrete Mathematics":
"When [Knuth] taught Concrete Mathematics at Stanford for the first time, he explained the somewhat strange title by saying that it was his attempt to teach a math course that was hard instead of soft. He announced that,
contrary to the expectations of some of his colleagues, he was not going to teach the Theory of Aggregates, nor Stone's Embedding Theorem, nor even the Stone-Čech compactification. (Several students from the civil engineering department got up and quietly left the room.)"
It's a joke between students of quantum mechanics that to get operator from a function according to the principle of least action you have to put "^" above the function name.
I'm surprised that should he exist, everyone assumes he is obligated to interdict himself in the affairs of men. If I'm honest, it's a little arrogant of us.
he canonically created us, didn't he? got to be at least a little bit interested. tho of course I don't see the point of debating the motivations of a fictional character
Sideburns aren't called sideburns just because they're on the sides of your face; sideburns were originally called burnsides after the American Civil War general Ambrose Burnside [1].
Perhaps apropos to this thread: The closest airport to Oracle’s headquarters is San Carlos, which has the airport code SQL. The airport and code were around long before the database company, however.
There seem to be two meanings of “unexpected” not being differentiated here:
1) name-derived terms like Debian, or the French ‘poubelle’ in the comments, which have become genericized to the point where most of its users don’t know the derivation
2) a more interesting subset of (1), like PageRank, or Lake Mountain in the comments, where part or all of the name itself looks like a normal word appropriate for the situation. (a related concept is nominative determinism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism)
We can add a third one where the name comes from a person that was likely named after a place, which is why it looks normal (Westlake, Outerbridge).
And for #2, most of them are surely done knowing that there's a double meaning, but the origin has been left behind. There's probably a few names that are now more associated with the person than the original pun.
I agree with your distinction, but for a long time I wrongly believed the -ian in Debian was a suffix meaning "relating to" as in reptilian or antediluvian. I didn't have a guess what the first part meant, but I thought it might be a nonsense syllable.
Munich has (at least) two streets unexpectedly named after people - Passauerstraße and Dessauerstraße. The problem of these people is that their names are derived from well-known cities, so everyone just assumes that the streets are named after the cities. The only thing indicating that they are actually named after people is that the street names are written as one word - streets named after places are supposed to be written as two words (e.g. Landshuter Allee), but many people get this wrong even without this twist...
When I first encountered that in a Facebook post, I was skeptical but since I happened to be at the library at the time and mere feet away from a hardcopy OED. The OED corroborated it.
Of course the "offical" name is "Compiler Explorer", but everybody just refers to it as "Godbolt" (probably because of the URL), which I thought is a weird but interesting name for a programming tool until I learned much too late that a certain "Matt Godbolt" has created it :D
You might make your German Chocolate Cake with Baker's Chocolate, a popular American brand of baking chocolate, named for Dr. William Baker, who founded a chocolate importing company.
Not so much you might, but you most likely would have used Baker's chocolate: Mr. German, the baker/chocolatier, worked for Baker's chocolate when he invented his dark chocolate formulation, and German's chocolate was sold under the Baker's Chocolate brand. All this took place over 150 yrs ago.
The cake made from German's chocolate was invented by a housewife in the 1950's and the recipe published in a newspaper; General Foods, by then the owner of Bakers, took notice and started to include the recipe in its packaging.
except it was just a factual description of history, condensed, but taut and clarifying of possible misconceptions, and nothing about recipes or flavors or any other organileptic properties.
This phenomenon exists in the German language as well. The "Schwarzschild" in Schwarzschild radius literally means "black shield", but it is in fact named after Karl Schwarzschild.
On the other hand, there are terms like eigenvector/eigenvalue, which literally mean "own"-vector/"own"-value in German. When I first learned that they still have the "eigen" prefix when translated to English, I immediately assumed that they are named after some mathematician named Eigen. To my surprise, that was not the case -- for some reason, mathematicians did indeed decide to use the German word for "own" as a prefix.
Buses are often called "pullman" in Italy. For long time I thought it was because the pull men (and women) along the road, but instead it appears there are named after some George Pullman.
Also in Italy, the loop highway around Rome is known as GRA, which stands for "Grande Raccordo Anulare" ("Big Annular Highway"), but that is just a backronym: originally it is also the surname of Eugenio Gra, the engineer who designed it.
> Buses are often called "pullman" in Italy. For long time I thought it was because the pull men (and women) along the road, but instead it appears there are named after some George Pullman.
Related to "big annular": why does the Latin word for ring have a diminutive suffix (-ulus), even when it refers to big rings? Well, of course because anus came to refer to one very specific ring.
I am not sure of what is the historical order of things: in Latin the word "anus" does also mean "ring" or "circle", although it later came to only retain its anatomical meaning, while its diminutive retained the general meaning. But as for what caused what, I have no idea.
Let me just note that there are other words that descend from the Latin diminutive instead of the basic form. For example, "castrum" with its diminutive "castellum" became "castello" in Italian and "castle" in English, while the base form was retained only in toponyms (the suffix "chester" in English and "castro" in Italian). As for "anellus", I see no compelling reason to use the diminutive instead of the base form. I guess it's just an artifact of time (with a funny result: since Italian has again suffixes for diminutive and augmentative, we can use the words "castellino" and "castellone", literally a "little little castrum" and "big little castrum"; confusing!).
Most think it a native name, that there was some warrior or chief named "Kicking Horse" and that we should rename the pass to give it a proper pronounciation in the native language. I've seen people protest about this (1990s, pre-wikipedia) and try to locate the historical person of which there are a few with that name. The reality is that one of the guys surveying the pass was literally kicked by his horse. No translation needed.
A little less exciting, but Roger's Pass (another mountain pass between BC and Alberta) was named after... Major A. B. Rogers was hired in April 1881 by the railway company to find the pass with the promise of having the pass named after him and a $5000 bonus. [1].
In my hometown there's a shop with two big signs: "Puertas Motos" and "Motos Puertas". I've always passed by too fast, by car, so I can't tell if it's some guy whose name is Puertas selling motorbikes or some guy called Motos selling doors.
On the topic of things unexpectedly not named after people...
There's a big sign on a somewhat run-down looking building on a main street in my city, that says "GENTILES". Turns out it's a company that makes flooring - i.e. short for "general tiles".
Also, there's a chain of restaurants in the northeastern US called "Friendly's" that was founded by people named "Blake", not "Friendly". It was originally named "Friendly" ice cream from 1935-1989, but eventually added the apostrophe-s because people insisted on calling it that. It still gives me a little Mandela-effect type dissonance because I remember when the logo didn't match what people said and now it does.
I remember being slightly surprised when I learned that Friendly's was founded by Prestley Blake (not by someone named Friendly), but because he was an alumnus of and major donor to my high school, this fact sort of got drummed into me to the extent that I eventually considered it strange that other people didn't know who the founder was!
That's awesome! Is it in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain? If so, I just looked it up and vg ybbxf yvxr gurl ner n qbbe naq jvaqbj fhccyl fgber, juvpu vf gb fnl gur frpbaq bs lbhe gjb cbffvovyvgvrf. (I don't want to spoil it for you if you're enjoying the ambiguity.)
In french, a waste container is called "une poubelle". From the name of the prefect Eugène Poubelle who decided the collection of waste in Paris in 1884.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poubelle
This isn't just a list of things named after people, but "unexpectedly named". For example "Main Street" being named after a person is surprising since you'd usually expect it to come from "main" in the sense of "principal". "Price Club" is funny since you'd expect that it's referring to low prices.
Is there another pre-existing meaning for "poubelle" that makes this naming unexpected?
> Is there another pre-existing meaning for "poubelle" that makes this naming unexpected?
I mean, it _is_ the French term for "trash can".
It might be surprising to you, for example, if you'd suddenly find out that trash cans are named after "Michael Trashcan" or something along those lines.
It's a "can" that one puts "trash" into, so the term appears descriptive on the surface. When it then turns out to just be named after the inventor, it would indeed be quite surprising. Which is why I was asking whether there was some pre-existing meaning for the word. Otherwise it's like:
Oh my God! I just realized that Zeppelins were invented by Graf von Zeppelin. What are the odds of the person inventing airships also having the last name that airships are often called by?
I see your point and perhaps my example was poorly chosen. A better one would've been "a bin by Frederik Bin" or something along those lines. Poubelle is an everyday item, a term that the average person uses daily (and without knowing the exact etymology, I'd wager). And with that in mind, Zeppelin appears to be a poor comparison on your part.
The surprising thing is not that he invented the poubelle. It’s that he’s just one elected official in one city who increased its usage. I’m on the other side of the Atlantic, in beautiful Québec, and we also call it une poubelle.
It's a bit how in British English vacuum cleaners are often called "Hoovers" after the brand. At one hand, yes, it is a family name, but the word has become so genericized that people even talk about "hoovering" their carpet and any connection to a name is lost.
And young children (and occasionally their parents jocularly imitating them) talk about "hooving" the carpet, because a "hoover" is obviously a machine for "hooving", right?
“Is the FBI in the habit of cleaning up after multiple murders?!!”
“Of course. Why do you think it’s run by a man called Hoover?”
This was a joke in the ‘80s Clue movie; albeit probably funnier to the English writer and the English actor saying the lines, as Hoover as a generecized trademark for vacuum cleaner is more popular there.
Even in the US, it's such a well-known brand that the joke still works well, despite Hoover not being so dominant as to have become the generic word for vacuum cleaner.
No, Ian is just another name (Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian). Deb is after Debra, who then was his girlfriend and then wife. After that Murdock left Debian and the two divorced, but the name had stuck and there it is still now.
I was confused by Hamming Windows and Hanning Windows. At first I though Hanning was a typo for Hamming, but no, they are both similar but slightly different things, named after different people.
These two similarly-named Hamming and Hanning (more properly referred to as Hann) window functions both have a sinusoidal shape. The difference between them is that the Hanning window touches zero at both ends, removing any discontinuity. The Hamming window stops just shy of zero, meaning that the signal will still have a slight discontinuity.
The Outerbridge Crossing really surprised me! I had always assumed it was the most outer bridge crossing from New Jersey into New York.
Another piece of local infrastructure named after the architect is the Holland Tunnel. It’s not named after the region in Europe and has no relation to New York originally being settled by the Dutch.
Vacaville, CA - vaca is Spanish for cow, and is home to cattle ranches. Despite many people thinking that it means "cow town", it's actually named for the settler Juan Manuel Cabeza Vaca.
The health assessment Apgar Score, named for its inventor Dr Virginia Apgar, but frequently assumed to be an acronym/initialisation and spelled as APGAR.
Thanks for clearing that up for me. When I saw that the Aldi copy of a Mars bar is called Titan[1], I idly wondered if they were continuing a theme of celestial objects or Greco-Roman deities.
I had been leaning more towards the celestial object them due to the existence of Galaxy chocolate[2] and Milky Way bars[3]. On the other hand, Snickers bars [4] were called Marathon bars when I was growing up and this could have been a reference to the classical Greek battle (the Wikipedia page doesn’t say where this name comes from but I’d guess that it’s intended to imply that the bar will provide you with enough energy to a long distance).
There is a Texas town called Iraan that I assumed when passing through it must have something to do with the Mideast country, but is actually much more simply named after Ira and Ann. (So why not Iraann?)
Going down the wiki rabbit hole on this led me to the very sad history of Ian Murdock, founder of Debian (Deb was his girlfriend's name at the time). Apparently he hanged himself in 2015 after a somewhat bizarre tweet storm announcing his suicide.
I have no corroboration for this, it is a personal speculation.
At Sun, Ian Murdock also started an OS project called “Indiana”. I have wondered if this was a happy coincidence that Ian was substring of Indiana. Of course, he also lived in that state.
In fact Ian moved back here (Indiana) to found Progeny, before working at Sun. I was sufficiently shocked to find a genuine Linux company in Indiana I had to apply immediately.
Ian Murdock( his name ) & his wife name debra ...debian. (wkipedia)
docker Inc ....Not sure if its coincidence...he was working for Docker Inc. (Ian Murdock...last four letters "dock" docker inc.)... However very sad ending..another gem lost de excessive poiice harassment....like aaron.
There's a common story that referring to a toilet as a "crapper" was related to Thomas Crapper. Apparently, not true, despite his influence in the field. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Crapper
"Its name came from John W. Kottinger, an Alameda County justice of the peace, who named it after his friend, Union army cavalry Major General Alfred Pleasonton. A typographical error by a recording clerk in Washington, D.C., apparently led to the current spelling."
A list of transcription errors that changed the names of people and places would be interesting.
There was a local manufacturing company in Indianapolis that seemingly couldn’t keep its own name consistent: a buggy maker founded by two brothers named Parry also used the name “Perry” at times.
Who drove me crazy in an audiobook I listened to recently on WWI, whose author, one can only assume intentionally, kept deploying phrases like (very roughly paraphrased from memory) "As a British officer, French hated and distrusted the French, who resented being commanded by a Briton."
Fuchsia is named after Leonhart Fuchs, which makes it much easier to spell once you know.
Tarmac is an abbreviation of tarmacadam, which is named for John Loudon McAdam. It’s also where the verb “macadamisation” comes from, which is a great word.
>The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank™, and assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's not why it's called PageRank. It's actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
Bluetooth: tenth-century king Harald Bluetooth united dissonant Danish tribes into a single kingdom. (re: uniting communication protocols)
I guess it's not so surprising bc why the heck is it named after a tooth (had been thinking... the shape of a Bluetooth dongle? Lol) but still, this is a pretty obscure ref.
Macadamia nuts are native to Australia and were named in honor of Dr John Macadam, "a Scottish-Australian chemist, medical teacher, Australian politician and cabinet minister, and honorary secretary of the Burke and Wills expedition."
Scientific names are frequently eponymous, but very few common foods were discovered by Europeans after Linnaeus invented modern taxonomy. New World food names are usually derived from native words (avocado, potato, etc).
From the same last name, “tarmac” is a shortening of tarmacadam, from tar + macadam; the latter named for John Loudon McAdam. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macadam
The Cueva de los Verdes, a famous cave on Lanzarote, was named after the Verdes family and contains nothing green. (Well worth seeing if you ever get a chance to go.)
There is a long list of tautological place names, most often where multiple languates are ised in the name.
"Rio Grande River" means "Big River River" (rio being river and grande big).
"Kill" is Dutch for creek (e.g., Fishkill).
"Avon" is Celtic (Gaelic, Irish, Welch) for river (River Avon).
"Hatchie" is Choctaw for river (Loosahatchie River)
"Mississippi" is Anishinaabe for "big river".
Similarly Mekong, Cuyahoga, Wadi (or the Hispanified "guada"), Molopo, Ouse, Reka, Upė, Walla, "ci-" perfix (Java), Owen, and otheers in different refions.
Bothmia, Chad, Laguna, Lagunita, "-kal", Loch, bach, Michigan are all other terms for bodies of water (lakes, bays, etc.).
Mercedes is a common Spanish first name meaning "mercies" and is the short version of one of the titles of the Virgin Mary. But then, a lot of Spanish names for girls are titles of the Virgin Mary.
The female name is normally spelled "Portia", from the main character in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Haven't you ever seen A Fish Called Wanda??
From Wikipedia: "Duns Scotus wrote treatises on theology, grammar, logic and metaphysics, which were widely influential throughout Western Europe... The followers of Duns Scotus were called the Dunses, Dunsmen, or Scotists. When in the sixteenth century the Scotists argued against Renaissance humanism, the term duns or dunce became, in the mouths of the Protestants, a term of abuse and a synonym for one incapable of scholarship."
This is similar to how people call others "Einstein" when they do something stupid.
One of the funniest cases I know of is actually a reverse case. A French/Russian caricaturist, Emmanuel Poiré, published his work under the name Caran d'Ache, which is a french transliteration of the word карандаш which means pencil in Russian. The Swiss company Caran d'Ache "borrowed" his name six years after he died in 1909, and became on of the most renowned companies in this business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caran_d%27Achehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caran_d%27Ache_(company)
Reminds me of an episode from Under the Influence (covers history through the lens of marketing). Specifically:
S7E11A - Brands Are People, Too - Products Named After Inventors
This week, we explore famous Products Named After Their Inventors. Some products are so cemented in our minds we forget their names once belonged to people. Shrapnel was invented by Henry Shrapnel, nachos were invented by Nachos Anaya and the leotard was invented by a Jules Leotard. We’ll even look at some inventors who wish their names had been forgotten...
13 year old me was confused by holter monitors, which are wearable heart monitors invented by Norman J. Holter. Everyone seems to pronounce it as halter, and mine was kind of like a halter. 20 years later my Dog got one I and I saw it spelled out on a receipt..
In Austin, Texas there is a high school football stadium called House Park (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Park). For many years I assumed that house meant something like venue. (In theater, there is house lighting. And restaurants serve house wine.)
But it's actually named after Edward M. House, a political figure who donated the land.
There's also a Slaughter Lane. This being Texas, one might guess it is a road to a slaughterhouse, but it's named after the Slaughter family who were early settlers in the region.
Sabian, the cymbal manufacturer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabian), was named after Sally, Billy, and Andy Zildjian, the children of Robert Zildjian, when he had a conflict with his brother Armand Zildjian after he was not chosen to be the main CEO and successor of Avedis Zildjian.
My favorite is Legg–Calvé–Perthes disease. I had this as a child and it wasn't until filling out a medical form as an adult that I learned it was a name and not "leg calf perthes"
The most surprising one to me is MySQL, which is named after Widenius's daughter, My. My is a Vietnamese name and it's pronounced like English "me", so maybe we've been pronouncing MySQL wrong this whole time!
The Loyal Heights neighborhood in Seattle. According to
Wikipedia, "established by businessman Harry Whitney Treat in 1906 as part of the independent city of Ballard. Named for his daughter Loyal Graef Treat ..."
Many of these are just words subject to multiple interpretations, one of which happens to be a person's proper name, similar to the old linguistic teaser: "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana"
There’s a very good running joke on the show Childrens Hospital, which is about a children’s hospital: even though it is a hospital for children, it got its name from its founder, Dr. Arthur Childrens.
Along the same lines, I was very surprised to learn "sandwich" was named after its inventor! (Earl of Sandwich.) Guy literally invented the sandwich and had it named after him.
Folks may remember a game called Supreme Commander. One of the big 'experimental class' artillery is called a Mavor. Jonathan Mavor, was one of the developers.
The fact there's yet to be a modern equal to SupCom is really unfortunate. As fun as quick games are on FAF, I really enjoyed your long thousands of unit games... and the game just can't handle it.
The empire that ruled from Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire, is named after its founder, Osman I. (The modern country, Turkey, isn't named after its founder Ataturk, but rather the other way around.)
Therefore, the "Ottoman" footstool is named after a person.
Thomas Crapper, the inventor of many toilet features, including the floating ballcock, is not the origin of “crap” (which is of Middle English origin, and was used in the sense of excrement and the act of expelling it earlier than Crapper’s work), but is apparently the origin of “crapper” as a term for the fixture one uses for crap.
Yes. It would be natural to assume that the company was named in imitation of the established Firestone tire company (itself named for founder Harvey Firestone), but Bridgestone's Japanese founder's name means "Stone Bridge". Even more fitting, Bridgestone now owns Firestone.
Can you provide a citation for Harry Gold? All I find is a chemist convicted of spying for the Soviets.
I find [1] which outright declares the etymology is from the economic term, and that it was popularized in medicine by Peter Rudd in 1979, or from a 1962 punning usage referring to literal gold salts.
The economic sense of a gold specie currency has uses going back to at least 1764 [3][4][5].
Both publications notably do not capitalize 'gold standard'.
The first book simply calls it 'aptly named', pointing out the aptronym, but does not attribute the name to Harry Gold.
The NCBI says that Fisher (the famous statistician) established placebo with randomized control trial 'gold standard'.
It is coincidental that Harry Gold, a pharmacologist, is the progenitor of placebo therapy in American medicine - as the NCBI notes, placebo therapy is "as old as medicine itself".
The second one has "Gold", and "gold standard" but it does not link the two. The first links the two, but there are a number of sources here and at the least they disagree.
- Sideburns : Named after the American Civil War general Ambrose Burnside.
- Heaviside function (a mathematical step function) : named after Oliver Heaviside
- The Children's python (animal) : Named after John George Children.
- Snowflake, AZ : Named after Erastus Snow and William Jordon Flake.
- Lake Mountain, Victoria : No lake. Named after George Lake, who was the Surveyor-General of the area including the mountain.
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