My understanding is that mobile homes are named for Mobile, Alabama, and not for the fact that they are moveable.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mobile-home-origin/ What do you know?
Things Unexpectedly Named After People
131–140 of 294 posts
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#132German Chocolate Cake owes its name to an English-American chocolate maker named Samuel German.
Not to sound like I'm on Reddit, but in the category of surprising and infuriating, this one takes the cake.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]. 1: https://www.ncbi.nl…
https://books.google.com/books?id=wk-OxcTKyi4C&pg=PA105&lpg=... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3714297/
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".
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#134Tangentially, biological systematists (aka Taxonomists by some) take the cake: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]. 1: https://www.ncbi.nl…
https://books.google.com/books?id=wk-OxcTKyi4C&pg=PA105&lpg=... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3714297/
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.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#136Start a new list for things unexpectedly NOT named after people. Silly example "Bilirubin"
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#137I find this post and comments to be surprisingly delightful. I'll aggregate the scattered gems in the comments here: - 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…
Nice. As an aside, how do you pronounce Heaviside? Is it hevy-side or heevy-side or...?
My first interpretation was heveh-side or hevi-side.
I have no idea what the correct pronunciation is. But between you and me, I think we have some viable candidates.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#138I find this post and comments to be surprisingly delightful. I'll aggregate the scattered gems in the comments here: - 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…
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.”
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#139The Elo rating system in chess is often written in capital letters, but it is not an acronym. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo. https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/1327/what-does-elo...
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.
In chess there's even a difference between the "live elo rating" which is calculated every match, and the official FIDE rating updated every month.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#140My 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! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
There is also the Poynting Vector [1] named after John H. Poynting [2] that "points" in the direction that electromagnetic energy is flowing.