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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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
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
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.
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?
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'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
>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.
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!
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 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.)"
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 .)
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"
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.
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.
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.)
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].
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.
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.
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.
293 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadIs 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.
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?
It’s as if computers were called Jobs machines.
It's a different thing to some of the 'surprises' here, but interesting and I'm glad it was shared.
“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.
I'd always thought the comment's attributes name was because "dang, time to chastise another one" but it turns out that "Dan G" is (maybe) a person!
Man, look at all that karma fly out of the window... Oops. Wrong site!
Eponyms can be very weird sometimes. The path from austerity-pushing minister to artistic rendering of outline in profile must have been a bit odd.
https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/1327/what-does-elo...
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).
[1] https://external-preview.redd.it/w9bXzLbNqBFPIEnkI8H73sV5D8n...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dove_(chocolate)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way_(chocolate_bar)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snickers
https://www.godbolt.org/
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
Edit: oh it's in the article too.
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."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mountain_(Victoria)
Caesar isn't even a last name.
McDonald's, Hardee's.
> Caesar isn't even a last name.
Worked out fine for Julius.
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.
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?
> 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?
Very very common in my childhood in the northeastern and mid Atlantic United States. I have heard it from west coaters too.
No answer to the nickname "Smitty"? It is a common one, derived from Smith. You can Google it.
Tex-Mex and Cali-Mex aren't the same thing, and California has no claim to Tex-Mex...
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.
was unexpected to me when i first learned CSS, and now is a bittersweet memory i gladly pass on.
MySQL is named after the one of co-founder's daughter, My?
I knew the Debian. but this is mind boggling.
Interesting to me, as I thought it was Brin's idea, and 3 people worked on the paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93G...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius#Personal_life
>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.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010715123343/https://www.googl...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
"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.)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone%E2%80%93%C4%8Cech_compac...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting_vector
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Poynting
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilates
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Burnside#Sideburns
He's also the godfather of the Big and Little Indian Brothers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraan,_Texas
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050263