The "Sharpe Ratio" was named after William F. Sharpe, who developed it in 1966. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_ratio
He also invented the Sharpie marker, after other traders kept erasing his fibonacci plots on the whiteboard
Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)
291–300 of 346 posts
Re: Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)
#292One 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.
Re: Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)
#293> The diesel engine, named after Rudolf Diesel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine
Vin Diesel, named after the engine, was originally Mark Sinclair. Which is actually not a bad name.
Re: Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)
#294Nicotine after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Nicot
Re: Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)
#295My favorite is, although mentioned on the list without the Hungarian accented characters, is the ELO system (chess). Named after Árpád Élő, "Elo" is not an abbreviation but his last name, and means "living" in Hungarian.
It's not actually the "ELO" system. People just think it's an acronym mistakenly and capitalize it. It's supposed to be written as just "Elo."
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
Re: Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
" 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.
Saxophone is just as unexpected, other -phone musical terms, like vibraphone, idiophone, membranophone, come with a prefix unrelated to people. Sadism and masochism - perhaps less unexpected, but no less than shrapnel IMO.
All my life, I thought "sadism" had to do with the word "sad"!
Re: Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)
#297The 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 Augsbur…
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 aft…
Kuk = Cock, surely
Re: Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)
#298Re: Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same in Czech, tbh it's possible that English is the outlier here
English is definitely not an outlier. In french it's Rayon X
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:
X-ray-like: English, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, Portuguese
Röntgen-like: German, Danish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Russian, Hungarian
There’s way more of each than I’ve listed, of course. I just picked a few languages