341–346 of 346 posts
It took me too long to find out that Larry named PageRank after himself and not after ranking web pages. And I was horrified when I learned that lynching is named after someone, and a perpetrator at that.
Whereas boycott is named after the target of one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott
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.)
And not Pontius https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontius_Pilate
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 Augsbur…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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