The generic Hungarian word for trash cans, 'kuka', unexpectedly originates from the names of German industrialists Johann Josef Keller and Jakob Knappich.
The story is quite involved, to the extent that one would be tempted to dismiss it as a folk etymology, if it wasn't ridiculously well-attested.
Keller and Knappich founded an acetylene factory in Augsburg, Bavaria in 1898. They named it Keller und Knappich Augsburg (KUKA).
Their venture quickly expanded into manufacturing of welding equipment, household appliances, and eventually car parts and heavy industrial robots. In the 1920s, they manufactured hoppers for Hungarian municipal garbage trucks, which they stamped prominently with their logo.
This led to refuse trucks being known colloquially referred to as "kukás auto" (lit. "car with KUKA written on it"), even long after KUKA stopped manufacturing those hoppers. And the noun kuka, referring to trash cans, arose as a backformation from there! And this is how two German industrialist gave their names to Hungarian trash cans. Of course, it probably helped that a word kuka existed in the Hungarian language already at that point (as an unrelated adjective referring to a mute person), much like snowflake existed before Snow and Flake founded the town.
The story continues in the Netherlands, where a company licensed the Keller and Knappich design to produce their own trucks. Of course, they released it under their own names: Klinkenberg & Koster, abbreviated as KLIKO, which they too stamped in large font on their trucks and bins. And today "kliko" is the common Dutch name for the wheelie bin.
I guess only in those parts of the country where Kliko had a large market share at some point. The Otto brand name is so strong in the east that they have no idea what a Kliko is.
The most common word in Japanese for “stapler” is hochikisu or hotchikisu, which seems to come from the name of the E.F. Hotchkiss Company [1], an American manufacturer whose staplers were imported to Japan in the early 20th century. Some Japanese sources [2] say that the word comes from Benjamin Hotchkiss [3], an inventor of machine guns, and that is what I learned many years ago, but that etymology apparently has not been documented [4].
I had a moment to check and it’s actually interesting - looks like the world is split in two. Looking at a few languages closer to home (for me) we have:
"Sabiro" for a suit comes from "Savile Row", a street in London famous for its tailor shops, which in turn is named after Dorothy Boyle, Countess of Burlington and Cork (née Savile).
Continuing with the trend, the Polish word for outhouse is sławojka, named after Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski, a prime minister who is responsible for making them mandatory in the countryside in the 1920s, and apparently touring the country to check how sanitary they are. https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82awojka
Incidentally, 'kuk' is a Norwegian word, a somewhat pejorative synonym for 'penis', but almost as versatile as the four-letter word - it can be used as an adjective, a verb, an adverb, a noun etc.
Saying that 'something is kuka/kuket' means it is messed up beyond repair.
Even as I approach my fifties, I have to stifle a chuckle every time I see a KUKA robot. Kids never really grow up, I guess.
As for things named after people, the probably most prominent example in Norwegian today is the so-called 'Brustadbu', named after former minister of children and families, Sylvia Brustad.
The government she was in introduced a new law governing opening hours for convenience stores, effectively barring stores above 100sqm (1,100 sqft) from being open on Sundays.
Predictably, this gave rise to a lot of stores measuring 99.9sqm, colloquially referred to as 'Brustadbu'/'Brustad sheds'.
Interesting! "Kuki" in Hungarian is a children's word for penis. I assume it's a nickname for "kukac", meaning worm/maggot (which, btw, is the same word we use for the @ symbol).
This happened in Poland with long-haul trucks, which we often call tiry (plural of tir), with TIR being an abbreviation for "Transports Internationaux Routiers"[1], an international treaty covering the transport of goods by road. Vehicles using the provisions of this treaty must have a plate with TIR written on it, and so the world entered popular usage.
In Switzerland, there is a company Ochsner, which also manufactured the household bins to go with the hoppers, and patented that. Those bins became mandatory in quite a bunch of municipalities.
Eventually, garbage sacks were introduced like everywhere else, the bins became obsolete, though I still see hoppers from them, so they still make those.
Long story short, the bins (called "Ochsnerchübu") are gone, but the madness of patenting a freaking trashcan resulted in one of Switzerland's most successful bands having named themselves "Patent Ochsner".
"Silhouette" was a surprise when I'd learned of it a few years back.
The backstory: he was a financial minister and an advocate of austerity, such that when the practice of creating simple, cheap, shadow-profile head portraits of people emerged, his name was applied to them.
Yes, but the Main St. in San Francisco hasn't been around nearly as long as SF has. When the downtown grids were laid out, what's now Main St. was underwater. It didn't exist as land, let alone a road that was either significant or central. By the time it was filled in, it was home to Charles Main's mining provision shop.
The other way you can tell that it's not "main" is that it's parallel to 1st Street. Most cities don't have both a Main and a 1st, they have one or the other (which is why "Second Street" is the second-most common street name in the United States behind "Main", with "First" coming in third place). If SF were using Main in the "normal" sense, it would be where 1st is, next to 2nd. Failing that, it would at least be the next block over from 1st, so that 1st was counting from it. Washington, DC, sort of works that way, where there's a "zero street" (North/South Capitol), and then 1st is the next block over. But... SF's Main St. is a full three blocks from 1st. It's just kind of in the middle of nowhere, logically speaking. And that's again because of the landfill situation - 1st St. is the first full block counting from the shoreline at the time the streets were built.
San Francisco’s “Main Street” is in no way a major artery, however. Market Street served that function.
Here’s an 1853 map https://rumsey.geogarage.com/maps/g3463000.html in which today’s Main Street is only a block long. The map calls it Front St, although there’s another Front St nearby which kept the name – perhaps it was renamed Main to disambiguate once the streets connected?
That map also showcases another example of this - Townsend Street is named after one James Townsend, who was the alcalde [1] in 1848, not for its location at the end of town. (Geary, Leavenworth, and Bryant are also named for pre-statehood alcaldes, but their names are less amusingly coincidental.)
I worked on Main for years and nobody mentioned this urban legend. while the street is not long, I would not put it past bureaucrats to name a random street Main
It could (conceivably) be that "in San Francisco" is meant literally, and that in San Francisco it's true, even if not the case for other instances of "Main Street" elsewhere, however; a cursory web search leads me to think "urban legend" is by far the more likely. It's always been my understanding that "Main Street" either is currently, or was at some time nearer the town / city's beginning the main street that went through "downtown".
It is literally true specifically for San Francisco. The street now named Main in San Francisco didn't exist for the first few decades after the city's founding and grid-laying (it was underwater, just off shore in San Francisco Bay!), and at no point has it been a street of any particular prominence.
In the heart of the Georgian city of Bath we have 3 streets designed by the architect John Wood.
The streets are named Quiet St, John St and Wood St. It is claimed that the naming of these streets is based on the 3 words most regularly used in the clearly passionate council meetings of the time.
In Quebec, there is a tax one pays to your municipality upon the purchase of a house called the "Taxe de Bienvenue". This translates to "Welcome Tax", which it commonly is called by anglos.
Many clever folks might overhear you call it that and say "Welll actuuallyy it is named after a minister by the name of Jean Bienvenue, and so that translation is incorrect".
Well, it turns out that's actually incorrect, and was mistakenly repeated by a local newspaper.
A case of "things unexpectedly not unexpectedly named after a person".
Well yeah, I guess the perverse naming (having to pay a tax isn't really likely to make you feel welcome) led people to look for alternative explanations...
But is it perverse naming? It seems functional to me. It's (a flowery way of) describing the thing you're paying for through the tax: the costs associated with onboarding you into the municipal government systems associated with home-owner record keeping — i.e. the costs of "welcoming" you.
Ticketmaster has "convenience fees" — if you don't pay them, you don't get "convenience." Well, if you don't pay the "welcome" tax, then you won't get "welcomed" (i.e. made able to live there.)
(I guess maybe it's intuitive to me because I see municipalities as private corporations like any other, that have ultimate authority on whether people get to live on their incorporated land. By default, you're not "welcome" to own land in a city! The city has to decide that!)
This reminds me of two (that I'm aware of, there may be more) street names in Munich that appear to be named after places but are actually named after people named after places: Passauerstraße (named after the leader of a peasant uprising rather than the city Passau) and Dessauerstraße (named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_I,_Prince_of_Anhalt-De... rather than the city Dessau) - the only clue being that streets named after places, e.g. Aachener Straße, are written with a space in the name (or rather should be, but lots of people already get this rule wrong), while streets named after people are written as one word or with dashes. Needless to say, the likelihood of these street names being spelled wrong is even higher, including in a very prominent (and expensive to fix) place: an illuminated street sign in a tunnel https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/sendling-westpark-ort... - it's hard to see in the photo, but the letters are made of individual LEDs, so correcting the mistake would basically require building a new sign.
Also Gärtnerplatz, named after the famed architect Friedrich von Gärtner.
Fun fact: The Gärtnerplatz is located on the street Klenzestraße, which is named after the other famous architect and von Gärtner's rival, Leo von Klenze.
That first one sounds so much like a folky, jokey etymology, and yet, it’s true…
Given the existence of “logarithms”, it’s doubly surprising…hey, why are they called that?
Wikipedia says “Napier coined the term for logarithm in Middle Latin, "logarithmus," derived from the Greek, literally meaning, "ratio-number," from logos "proportion, ratio, word" + arithmos "number".”
- Aldi (supermarket chain), founded by the Albrecht brothers, thus ALbrecht DIskont
- Adidas, founded by ADolf DASsler
- Mercedes-Benz, named by Emil Jellinek-Mercedes after his daughter Mercedes, initially with Daimler which then merged with Benz
- Audi, founded by August Horch. Initially founded as _A. Horch & Cie. Motorwagenwerke Zwickau_, he later lost the rights to the name "Horch". He named his new company "Audi", which is a translation of his name into Latin: in German, "horch" is the imperative for "horchen" (to listen), which maps to "audi" as the imperative for "audire" in Latin
And then there are a just a ton of companies named after their founders (Porsche, Bosch, Siemens, …) but I'm not sure if these count :)
It seems like these are different than the ones in the website. These are not really "unexpected" in the way that "PageRank", which is an algorithm for ranking pages, turns out not to be names after the pages it ranks, but the Page that invented it.
The examples in your post are just the source of these names, which may be unknown to many, but are not unexpected.
I sometimes feel that German founders are too stuck on naming their company after themself, some of them really should have looked for alternatives, e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppelfricke
It’s generally the result of them starting as personal or family businesses, so initially your brand is your name. Then the business grows so large the relationship inverts. It does not have much to do with germany really, it’s common the world over.
For example, just from US car brand, you obviously have Ford, but also Olds (Ransom E.), Chevrolet (Louis and Arthur), Buick (David), Chrystler (Walter), Dodge (Horace Elgin and John Francis), …
And I can’t fault a German industrialist from 1910 for not English-proofing his business.
It's not the lack of English-proofing, it's the connotations that this name has for Germans: "Sepp" is a very common and not really glamourous first name/nickname, and "frickeln" means tinkering or fiddling around with something (usually with the negative sense of tinkering rather than fixing it properly).
I don't see the connection to German founders there, as many small / medium sized businesses like the one you linked are called after their founders everywhere (plumbers, printers, electricians,...)
I was quite surprised to discover the source of the names of British supermarket chains Tesco and Waitrose.
Waitrose is a contraction of "Waite, Rose & Taylor"
Tesco is the combination of a supplier's name, with the founder's (Jack Cohen) name. They also have a "Jack's" brand.
King Street in Hammersmith, London, was named after John King, Bishop of London in 17th century. [0]
Neanderthals were named after Joachim Neumann, a 17th century clergyman and composer who Latinised his surname to Neander (both literally meaning "new man"). He particularly loved a certain valley near Düsseldorf, so much in fact that it was renamed "Neandert(h)al" after him. [1]
Sideburns, a once popular style of male facial hair, was named after the Union general Ambrose Burnside. [2]
Excellent point! In fact it's both - "neo" from Latin and "ander" from Greek. And I stand corrected on another point: it was actually his grandfather who changed the name, so our Joachim actually was born Neander.
At the opposite end of things, here's Stigler's law of eponymy[0]. This "law" states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
You might think Morgan Hill, California was named because of a prominent feature of the landscape. Nope, named after a guy named Morgan Hill.
(And the hill you see in Morgan Hill, CA is actually named El Toro — the Spanish word for "lawnmower". Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen, I'll be here for one more night.)
One might think that Menlo Park, California was founded after the one made famous by Edison in New Jersey, but amazingly it's the other way around.
Via Wikipedia:
In 1876, Thomas Edison set up his home and research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, at the time an unsuccessful real estate development named after the town of Menlo Park, California.
Edison also had a winter home in Orlando, Florida. And Orlando was NOT founded by George Boole, despite containing both substrings "or" and "and" (but not "not").
This site [1] claims to be a Spanish dictionary and it doesn't agree, it claims the word is "la cortadora de césped".
I guess it's possible that the word has become a generic trademark [2] like Kleenex, since of course (?) Toro [3] is a brand of lawnmowers and other equipment.
Edit: switching Toro's site to Spanish [4] shows that they at least use the term consistent with [1], which seems to add credibility. :)
Spanish and English usually merge in fun, unpredictable ways. In certain parts of Andalusia people refer to electrical drills as "el guarrito" (the little pig). Turns out it's because there was a drill brand called "Warrington", hence the mix.
My mother's family has lived in Morgan Hill for over a century, and I've been there often. It always bothered me when I was a little boy that El Toro was not in fact called "Morgan Hill", and that none of the local hills were Morgan Hill.
I thought the Pap Test was an acronym (PAP) but it's actually named after the physician that invented it, Papanicolaou: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pap_test
Oh it's the Finnish girl's name, like Little My from the Moomins. That is definitely an improvement, reading it as the possessive pronoun makes it look like the name of some pushy preinstalled crapware. YourSQLExperience. EnjoyData. MyCloudStorageIDidntAskFor.
First of all the name My is (Finland-)Swedish, the Finnish name of the character is Pikku Myy.
The Finnish name registry contains only ~2 mentions before the publication of the hugely popular first Moomin book (and none for Myy) so this girls' name and hence the name in the MySQL really comes from the Moomin stories.
And finally, the name of Little My is a play on the Greek small letter mu, i.e. μ, and you'd be closer to the real idea and original pronunciation if you thought of it as MuSQL (μSQL) instead ;)
I think one of the most unexpected words in English to be named for a person is "guy"! From Guy Fawkes. The word went from meaning an effigy of Fawkes, to any doll, to a person.
Firestone is from Harvey S. Firestone though. Interesting that two companies with similar names had different origins, yet one would acquire the other many years later.
Ford Charcoal was made from recycled Model T scrap lumber and sold in Ford dealerships. It was bought out in the 50s and renamed to Kingsford Charcoal after the name of the town where the plant was located (the town named after Henry Ford's cousin who helped supply the lumber to Henry Ford).
(Another fun fact, the charcoal process was developed by none other than Thomas Edison)
Interesting, because it highlights that from the beginning boycotts were morally fraught, and even the first (?) boycott involved violence against non-participants.
The Mackintosh is named after Charles Macintosh, inventor of the modern waterproof raincoat.
The Macintosh is named indirectly after John McIntosh, a Canadian farmer and apple breeder of Scottish descent, who gave his name to the McIntosh Red cultivar.
The Mackintosh building of the Glasgow School of Art is named after Charles Rennie Mackintosh, born McIntosh.
5061 McIntosh is named after Bruce McIntosh, a Canadian astronomer.
One of my favorites is that the creator of Pilates was a guy named Joe Pilates. It’s like if the inventor of yoga was named Vivek Yoga (which is not the case, to be clear.)
I think I was an adult when I heard the term Pilates.. why would it be intriguing, if his name were Brethorst people would be saying "Let's do you Brethorst exercises!"
Tantalizing: something you really want but probably cannot get.
...named after Tantalus, the son of Zeus who was condemned to stand in water under a fruit tree, but the fruit and water were always just out of reach. He had a daughter, Niobe, and son, Pelops.
Tantalum, the material, was named because it could not be easily dissolved in any acid, unlike most other metals. Despite knowing of the element's existence, researchers could not isolate the chemical in tantalite samples for decades, as it was always bound to this other material---later called niobium, although one guy thought there were two or more other metals and wanted to call the other one pelopium. Nope; all niobium!
Sadly, tantalum became something of a semi-professional metal outside of capacitors, and even there ceramics and aluminums are preferred for one reason or another---usually cost. It was good for bulb filaments until tungsten displaced it. It was great for fountain pen nibs but not as great as iridium and osmium. It doesn't help with alloying because it embrittles. Other biologically inert materials are usually chosen over tantalum for implants. It could be a refractory ceramic but tantalum carbide is not as heat resistant as hafnium carbide.
It also has weird nuclear properties, where someone will probably look back in a the distant future and remark, "damn, that awesome commercial application of nuclear tantalum evaded us for centuries! What a fitting name!"
I never connected until just now that I should probably avoid breathing in any of the magic smoke when a tantalum capacitor explodes.
Not quite the same, but the city of Washington, DC is named after George Washington, whose family hails from the town of Washington in northeast England.
But Georgetown, part of Washington, isn’t named for him - it predates his rise. It’s named either for King George II or for its founders, two guys named George. I guess George was a very common name back then.
Orcas Island, Washington. Not named after Orca whales. Named after Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, 2nd Count of Revillagigedo, the Viceroy of New Spain who sent an exploration expedition under Francisco de Eliza to the Pacific Northwest in 1791.
One that surprised me recently: Coriolis force. I think I'd always assumed it was some latin-derived term to do with curling or curving, but no: named for Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis.
I learned this in school when we finally had a teacher who read it with the french accent rather then the Italian/latin one (stress on last I rather then second O).
Mispronunciation of words I've only read has been the bane of my life.
Although one can stress a word in a sentence (prosodic stress) e.g for emphasis (contrast stress) there's no such thing as stressed syllables (tonic accent) in spoken french.
That's mostly why we native french people have a hard time speaking languages where stressed syllables matter and produces different phonemes for identically written syllables: the typical frenglish output is very monotonic and uniform. Combine that with the lack of back-of-throat Rs and tip-of-the-tongue TH which don't occur in french and you get your archetypal frenglish. And it's tough to learn because not only we're ill equipped by practice to produce those (proprioception and muscle strength) we also have a hard time hearing them as well, so we map those to french R and Z.
Conversely for someone whose native language is accented it's hard to understand that french completely lacks these, so the only way to think of how written-french syllables sound when read is that every syllable is accented, uniformly so.
Thomas Crapper sold an improved toilet with his name marked on them, which were popular in England. US soldiers stationed there started referring to toilets as "the crapper", possibly because in the US "crap" still meant "refuse", a specific sort of which was ingested by the crapper. [1]
The toilet is also called the "john" because John Harrington invented the first flushing toilet in Britain. [2]
In British usage, "to hoover" means "to vacuum [e.g. a carpet]" or "to suck up as if by a vacuum cleaner" (e.g. "tech companies hoover up as much user data as they can"). Murray Spangler, a janitor, invented a vacuum cleaner to avoid aggravating his asthma while cleaning. W. H. Hoover bought his patent and founded the Hoover company, which sold the devices which hoovered the dirt. [3]
Here's an interesting example: in the Whoniverse there is this concept of a "deadlock seal", which is kind of a lock which is almost impossible to break (it is (in)famously resistant even to sonic devices, which is a big deal). Apparently, it was named after an Arthur Deadlock (https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Deadlock_seal).
I can only assume this is a deliberate joke of the authors, of course.
The teddy bear was named after Theodore Roosevelt (The president of the USA), after saving a baby bear during a hunting expedition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_bear)
"Saving" makes it sound like the bear survived, which is not what actually happened:
> A suite of Roosevelt's attendants, led by Holt Collier, cornered, clubbed, and tied an American black bear to a willow tree after a long exhausting chase with hounds. They called Roosevelt to the site and suggested that he shoot it [...] Roosevelt refused to shoot the bear himself, deeming this unsportsmanlike, but instructed that the bear be killed to put it out of its misery
Oh, here's one: UC Irvine is named after the Irvine family, who named the university. The city was then named afterwards after because it didn't even exist at the time.
I wonder how much this was a "thing unexpectedly named after a person" vs. a case of nominative determinism.
If my last name were Price, I tell you, from the moment I understood the potential implications, I'd be vaguely considering becoming an entrepreneur and starting a business focused on low prices in some way or another — just so I could make the pun.
The other NYC bridges are all (I think?) named Bridge, but they went with Crossing here because Outerbridge Bridge sounds weird.
Another NYC one: A lot of people think "major" in The Major Deegan Expressway means it is a significant expressway, but actually the expressway is named after (Army) Major William Deegan
Maybe I'm weird but I think NYC area has numerous semi-poetic sounding roads (while most of the country just uses route numbers): Harlem River Drive, Cross Bronx, Major Deegan, Van Wyck, Belt Parkway, Grand Central Parkway, the Taconic, Palisades Parkway, the B.Q.E., the Sprain Brook. Plus the Verrazano and Tappan Zee.
Houston does the same with its highways, and, in fact, they have different names depending on their relation to downtown. For example, I-45 is both the Gulf Freeway and North Freeway, 59 is both Eastex and Southwest.
Austin also has named highways (Mopac, Capital of Texas, Research), except I-35, which I was once told was because "it was the only one not created locally."
Context for non-New Yorkers: Outerbridge is the southernmost bridge in NYC and New York State, and Staten Island might as well be on Mars for the rest of the city. So the name "Outerbridge" is all the more fitting (and surprising).
The George Washington Bridge and Outerbridge Crossing both connect New York City (on the east) with New Jersey (on the west) but are about 45 minutes apart, even with no traffic.
IKEA - an acronym for Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd (With I.K. being the name of the founder, Elmtaryd being the place he grew up and Agunnaryd being the closest village.)
Terrible nitpick on a delightful list: I disagree that Unilever deserves to be in the list. It’s the merger of Lever Brothers and Boterunie and the combo is a typical corporate word soup. Might as well add PriceWaterhouseCooper otherwise.
There used to be TV commercials for a piece of fitness equipment called the Ab Doer. It was supposedly created by John Abdo. I’m still not sure but as far as I can tell he was a real guy and that was his real name.
As a teen, I thought the "Coriolis" in "Coriolis force" was a Latin word meaning something like "rotating", I was shocked when I found out it's a person's name.
I think technically it's named after the flower, which is named after the guy. Worth noting also that the flower was only discovered and named after him after Leonhart Fuchs had already been dead for 130 years; the color was apparently only named another 160 years after that when someone invented a dye, decided it was the color of fuchsia flowers, and called it fuchsine. And then France won the Battle of Magenta and they renamed the commercial dye made from it 'magenta' in its honor, making TWO surprisingly recent invented color names for the price of one.
I think this cheeky habit of biologists also deserves a mention: naming newly discovered organisms after friends or foes, depending on how they feel about those people at the time. Here is the first of four separate wikipedia pages dedicated to those names:
"Unexpectedly named after people". Erlang seems to be short for for Ericsson Language, Elo is often misspelled ELO as if it stands for something. Shrapnel is less unexpected.
In the case of shrapnel I guess I always assumed it was derived from some World War era Germanic word for metal scrap/shards, so that it's just named after a British dude is pretty unexpected to me.
Vibra-, idio-, membrano-, aero-, etc. are existing or obvious prefixes. Sax- is not. All I can think of is Saxon, but saxophones are pretty recent, so that doesn't match.
Sousaphone is another -phone that's pretty obviously named after a person. Less well known but still pretty obvious are rothphone, heckelphone, sarrusophone, sudrophone.
They seem entirely expected, or at least not unexpected. Reading them doesn't lead you to assume some alternate obvious but wrong explanation. Imagine learning (made up example) that the musical triangle was named for it's inventor, "Stuart Triangle".
The main junction in Rome is called GRA, or Grande Raccordo Anulare (great ring junction).
The name actually comes from Eugenio Gra, one of its main designers
I also love places that are named after someone and it's slightly amusing/horrifying.
Harold Holt was the Australian Prime Minister in the 1960's, and went for a swim and went missing (yes, there are many, MANY local conspiracies this :)). So what did we do? Named a swimming pool[0] after him (construction actually started before his death, I believe).
It is generally agreed that Holt's disappearance was a simple case of an accidental drowning, but a number of conspiracy theories surfaced, most famously the suggestion that he was a spy from the People's Republic of China and had been collected by a Chinese submarine.
Named for Sedona Schenbly, of Goren, Missouri. She and her husband had moved to Arizona for their health. He wanted to open a Post Office, but the Post Office authorities didn't favor his suggestion of naming it "Schenblyville Station." Thankfully, he chose to name it after his wife.
One that is widely know but people never seem to think about is "America".
Named after the sort of person we would probably not name anything after nowadays, and, ironically, doing so would be most outrageous in the places named after him.
Exactly my point. I would also enforce the accents, haha.
Especially because when I was younger, I always thought it is "élő" (living, persisting, current), as in: it's the current up-to-date valuation of someone's rank
That seems pretty expected. If you’d asked me to guess where the word diesel came from, I probably would have guessed a name. Compare that to German chocolate cake, which seems preposterous.
German's Chocolate Cake is probably a better name for it. I knew something as up with that one the first time I met a german person and they had never heard of my favorite cake. Baker's chocolate was a surprise to me though, I've always made my German's Chocolate Cake with Baker's chocolate...
It sounds like the ancient Indian word for fate/consequences, but it is a synonym for normal household gas heater, and the etymology is KarMa = Karel Macháček, name of the engineer whose corporation produced them in former Czechoslovakia. This guy (Czech only):
Incidentally, Y Combinator is also named in honour of Charles Y, the little-known second cousin (once removed) of famous ML researcher Andrew Ng. May we never forget him.
Borders Books (for anyone who remembers it) was named after founders Tom and Louis Borders. Louis went on to found Webvan (for anyone who remembers that).
"this thing" is things unexpectedly named after people. "Borders" is an English word not in very popular use as a name; "Borders Books and Music" sounds more like it's of a piece with something like "Encore Books" than, as it turns out actually to be, with "Barnes & Noble Booksellers". So it's unexpectedly named after people.
The thing that made it unexpected in my case is that “borders” is an English word and was not previously known to me as a name. I was surprised and amused when I learned it was an eponym. That puts it in the same category as the other examples on this site, at least from my perspective.
Snow Canyon was named after Lorenzo and Erastus Snow. Incidentally, Erastus Snow is also one of the namesakes of Snowflake Arizona, which is on this list.
The main point is the list are things named after people who's etymology is utterly unexpected and surprising. It's like if the Rocky mountains were named after William Rocky.
Panettone, "Tony's bread." Or at least that's what my Italian acct. prof. insisted. Interestingly the Italian wiki entry is a lot longer than the English one and references this apparent urban legend.
-one, -ona, found also in several English loanwords from Italian, often via French: minestrone (< minestra 'soup'); provolone cheese (< provola 'a kind of cheese'); cartone (< carta 'paper') appears in English carton and cartoon; balloon (this may have been formed in Italian, though the usual form is pallone, or in French)); milione 'million' (< mille 'thousand');
As a small negative case, Gagarin st. in central St. Petersburg is not called in honor of Yuri, but due to the Loon bird (Gagara), who also gave Yuri the surname, and way earlier.
So waiting for the list of things not named after people.
There's a local engineering firm, Alt & Witzig, and I've always been curious what role, if any, the German translation of their names played in them deciding to start the company.
> The term gasoline originated from the trademark terms Cazeline and Gazeline, which were stylized spellings and pronunciations of Cassell, the surname of British businessman John Cassell, who, on 27 November 1862, placed the following fuel-oil advertisement in The Times of London:
> > The Patent Cazeline Oil, safe, economical, and brilliant [...] possesses all the requisites which have so long been desired as a means of powerful artificial light.[12]
> That 19th-century advert is the earliest occurrence of Cassell's trademark word, Cazelline, to identify automobile fuel. In the course of business, he learned that the Dublin shopkeeper Samuel Boyd was selling a counterfeit version of the fuel cazeline, and, in writing, Cassell asked Boyd to cease and desist selling fuel using his trademark. Boyd did not reply, and Cassell changed the spelling of the trademark name of his fuel cazelline by changing the initial letter C to the letter G, thus coining the word gazeline.[13] By 1863, North American English usage had re-spelled the word gazeline into the word gasolene, by 1864, the gasoline spelling was the common usage. In place of the word gasoline, most Commonwealth countries (except Canada), use the term "petrol", and North Americans more often use "gas" in common parlance, hence the prevalence of the usage "gas bar" or "gas station" in Canada and the United States.[14]
Hashemite is really just an adjective for the current foreign dynasty, which is from the Hejaz on the Red Sea coast of what is now Saudi Arabia. They were defeated there by the Saudis (1924-5).
The British gave the elderly Sharif exile in Cyprus, and put his sons on the thrones of Jordan (Abdullah), and Syria-then-Iraq (Faisal). These events are shown briefly at the end of Lawrence of Arabia, with Alec Guinness playing Faisal.
Alexandria, VA (upscale historic suburb of DC, near Mt. Vernon). Captain Phillip Alexander II, a random guy who happened to own the land. Not named after the city in Egypt.
I guess everyone knows that the Bell System was named after some phone guy, so maybe it's more of an aptonym, but seems worth including on the list for completeness.
mausoleum - "magnificent tomb," early 15c., from Latin mausoleum, from Greek Mausoleion, name of the massive marble tomb adorned with sculpture built 353 B.C.E. at Halicarnassus (Greek city in Asia Minor) for Mausolos, Persian satrap who made himself king of Caria.
It gets better, his brother Rudolf (whom he had a previous company with) also formed a shoe company after their falling out. It was originally named Ruda, but later renamed to Puma.
The names of Airport Codes is truly interesting as well. Basically early airports were farms and fields, and thus the airport code reflected the original famrland owners' name.
There isa book on the history of names of all places in California, and similarly, the names of places are who was effectively the earliest documented land owner of that area, or something from the native tribes.
That's not a real thing! Crap's a very old world, and according to Wikipedia "crapper" was first attested in a roughly modern sense when Sir Crapper was only about 10, well before his overflowing flush to prominence in the plumbing world.
The story is quite involved, to the extent that one would be tempted to dismiss it as a folk etymology, if it wasn't ridiculously well-attested.
Keller and Knappich founded an acetylene factory in Augsburg, Bavaria in 1898. They named it Keller und Knappich Augsburg (KUKA).
Their venture quickly expanded into manufacturing of welding equipment, household appliances, and eventually car parts and heavy industrial robots. In the 1920s, they manufactured hoppers for Hungarian municipal garbage trucks, which they stamped prominently with their logo.
This led to refuse trucks being known colloquially referred to as "kukás auto" (lit. "car with KUKA written on it"), even long after KUKA stopped manufacturing those hoppers. And the noun kuka, referring to trash cans, arose as a backformation from there! And this is how two German industrialist gave their names to Hungarian trash cans. Of course, it probably helped that a word kuka existed in the Hungarian language already at that point (as an unrelated adjective referring to a mute person), much like snowflake existed before Snow and Flake founded the town.