Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mobile-home-origin/ What do you know?
Look again. It's in The Repository Of Lost Legends (TROLL) section.
Thanks for the tip. I didn't know they did that.
Things Unexpectedly Named After People
181–190 of 294 posts
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#182Vacaville, 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.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#183PageRank was named after Larry Page? MySQL is named after the one of co-founder's daughter, My? I knew the Debian. but this is mind boggling.
Huh >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...
PageRank was originally designed to track Usenet posts that referenced one another. The "pages" in web nomenclature is a complete coincidence.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#184My 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
Or Čech cohomology, usually denoted with the check "v" above characters.
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.)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone%E2%80%93%C4%8Cech_compac...
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#185In 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.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#186Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#187Ashley Pond in Los Alamos, NM is a pond named after a man named Ashley Pond. It might be more correctly called Ashley Pond pond?
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.).
Gibralteer, knock (cnoc), Montana, Morro, Killimanjaro (killi), pen or pendell, pic ("peak), mesa.
Etc., etc., etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_nam...
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#188I've heard about Debian at least.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sti…
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.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#190Cakebread Cellars : named after Jack and Delores Cakebread.