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.”
Millbrae, California (suburb of San Francisco-San Jose right next to SFO) is a conjunction of Mill and 'brae.' Mill refers to Darius Ogden Mills (at one point the richest person in California) who purchased the land in 1860 and brae is a Scottish word for "rolling hills". [1]
Longyearbyen in Svalbard (Longyear Town), the main settlement, is named after John Monro Longyear, an American coal magnate from Michigan [2].
There is also a King Street in London's Hammersmith. The surprising bit is that, in a city full of places named after various monarch, it was named after bishop John King.
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."
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.
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!
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].
Perhaps apropos to this thread: The closest airport to Oracle’s headquarters is San Carlos, which has the airport code SQL. The airport and code were around long before the database company, however.
There seem to be two meanings of “unexpected” not being differentiated here:
1) name-derived terms like Debian, or the French ‘poubelle’ in the comments, which have become genericized to the point where most of its users don’t know the derivation
2) a more interesting subset of (1), like PageRank, or Lake Mountain in the comments, where part or all of the name itself looks like a normal word appropriate for the situation. (a related concept is nominative determinism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism)
We can add a third one where the name comes from a person that was likely named after a place, which is why it looks normal (Westlake, Outerbridge).
And for #2, most of them are surely done knowing that there's a double meaning, but the origin has been left behind. There's probably a few names that are now more associated with the person than the original pun.
I agree with your distinction, but for a long time I wrongly believed the -ian in Debian was a suffix meaning "relating to" as in reptilian or antediluvian. I didn't have a guess what the first part meant, but I thought it might be a nonsense syllable.
Munich has (at least) two streets unexpectedly named after people - Passauerstraße and Dessauerstraße. The problem of these people is that their names are derived from well-known cities, so everyone just assumes that the streets are named after the cities. The only thing indicating that they are actually named after people is that the street names are written as one word - streets named after places are supposed to be written as two words (e.g. Landshuter Allee), but many people get this wrong even without this twist...
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
You might make your German Chocolate Cake with Baker's Chocolate, a popular American brand of baking chocolate, named for Dr. William Baker, who founded a chocolate importing company.
This phenomenon exists in the German language as well. The "Schwarzschild" in Schwarzschild radius literally means "black shield", but it is in fact named after Karl Schwarzschild.
On the other hand, there are terms like eigenvector/eigenvalue, which literally mean "own"-vector/"own"-value in German. When I first learned that they still have the "eigen" prefix when translated to English, I immediately assumed that they are named after some mathematician named Eigen. To my surprise, that was not the case -- for some reason, mathematicians did indeed decide to use the German word for "own" as a prefix.
Buses are often called "pullman" in Italy. For long time I thought it was because the pull men (and women) along the road, but instead it appears there are named after some George Pullman.
Also in Italy, the loop highway around Rome is known as GRA, which stands for "Grande Raccordo Anulare" ("Big Annular Highway"), but that is just a backronym: originally it is also the surname of Eugenio Gra, the engineer who designed it.
> Buses are often called "pullman" in Italy. For long time I thought it was because the pull men (and women) along the road, but instead it appears there are named after some George Pullman.
Related to "big annular": why does the Latin word for ring have a diminutive suffix (-ulus), even when it refers to big rings? Well, of course because anus came to refer to one very specific ring.
Most think it a native name, that there was some warrior or chief named "Kicking Horse" and that we should rename the pass to give it a proper pronounciation in the native language. I've seen people protest about this (1990s, pre-wikipedia) and try to locate the historical person of which there are a few with that name. The reality is that one of the guys surveying the pass was literally kicked by his horse. No translation needed.
In 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.
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?
I was confused by Hamming Windows and Hanning Windows. At first I though Hanning was a typo for Hamming, but no, they are both similar but slightly different things, named after different people.
These two similarly-named Hamming and Hanning (more properly referred to as Hann) window functions both have a sinusoidal shape. The difference between them is that the Hanning window touches zero at both ends, removing any discontinuity. The Hamming window stops just shy of zero, meaning that the signal will still have a slight discontinuity.
[+] [-] air7|5 years ago|reply
- 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 Mountain, Victoria : No lake. Named after George Lake, who was the Surveyor-General of the area including the mountain.
[*] Search for the relevant comment for more info and references.
[+] [-] air7|5 years ago|reply
- 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.”
[+] [-] salmonellaeater|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Falls
[+] [-] mauvehaus|5 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student's_t-test
[+] [-] siddharth-mv|5 years ago|reply
https://www.dupageforest.org/places-to-go/forest-preserves/w...
[+] [-] arcticbull|5 years ago|reply
Longyearbyen in Svalbard (Longyear Town), the main settlement, is named after John Monro Longyear, an American coal magnate from Michigan [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millbrae,_California
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longyearbyen
[+] [-] javajosh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BerislavLopac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robsyme|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Lake_(Canada)
[+] [-] davycro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yibg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealSteel|5 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] erdosjr|5 years ago|reply
https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/1327/what-does-elo...
[+] [-] new2628|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkl|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
[+] [-] radioactivist|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting_vector
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Poynting
[+] [-] tgb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swyx|5 years ago|reply
was unexpected to me when i first learned CSS, and now is a bittersweet memory i gladly pass on.
[+] [-] bigtones|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfk13|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glennericksen|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth#Name
[+] [-] kristopolous|5 years ago|reply
It should be named after a slow, cumbersome, finicky and controversial leader who occasionally brought things together, but only temporarily.
Cromwell would suffice
[+] [-] DavidVoid|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Burnside#Sideburns
[+] [-] tobyhinloopen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggliemon|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] valiant-comma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rachelshu|5 years ago|reply
1) name-derived terms like Debian, or the French ‘poubelle’ in the comments, which have become genericized to the point where most of its users don’t know the derivation
2) a more interesting subset of (1), like PageRank, or Lake Mountain in the comments, where part or all of the name itself looks like a normal word appropriate for the situation. (a related concept is nominative determinism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism)
[+] [-] seaish|5 years ago|reply
And for #2, most of them are surely done knowing that there's a double meaning, but the origin has been left behind. There's probably a few names that are now more associated with the person than the original pun.
[+] [-] adrianmonk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rob74|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rusbus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flohofwoe|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] twic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evgen|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sukilot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriskrunch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinmchugh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djhaskin987|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmurray|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmmmmbop|5 years ago|reply
On the other hand, there are terms like eigenvector/eigenvalue, which literally mean "own"-vector/"own"-value in German. When I first learned that they still have the "eigen" prefix when translated to English, I immediately assumed that they are named after some mathematician named Eigen. To my surprise, that was not the case -- for some reason, mathematicians did indeed decide to use the German word for "own" as a prefix.
[+] [-] nemetroid|5 years ago|reply
* Swedish: egenvektor
* Spanish: vector propio/autovectore
* Italian: autovettore
* Finnish: ominaisvektori
* Turkish: özvektör
I think autovector would have been a good English term.
[+] [-] giomasce|5 years ago|reply
Also in Italy, the loop highway around Rome is known as GRA, which stands for "Grande Raccordo Anulare" ("Big Annular Highway"), but that is just a backronym: originally it is also the surname of Eugenio Gra, the engineer who designed it.
[+] [-] JadeNB|5 years ago|reply
Known in the US as the eponym of sleeper cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_(car_or_coach) .
[+] [-] taejo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|5 years ago|reply
Most think it a native name, that there was some warrior or chief named "Kicking Horse" and that we should rename the pass to give it a proper pronounciation in the native language. I've seen people protest about this (1990s, pre-wikipedia) and try to locate the historical person of which there are a few with that name. The reality is that one of the guys surveying the pass was literally kicked by his horse. No translation needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kicking_Horse_Pass
[+] [-] narag|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dolmen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsnell|5 years ago|reply
Is there another pre-existing meaning for "poubelle" that makes this naming unexpected?
[+] [-] c3534l|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|5 years ago|reply
https://www.tek.com/blog/window-functions-spectrum-analyzers
Hamming and Hanning
These two similarly-named Hamming and Hanning (more properly referred to as Hann) window functions both have a sinusoidal shape. The difference between them is that the Hanning window touches zero at both ends, removing any discontinuity. The Hamming window stops just shy of zero, meaning that the signal will still have a slight discontinuity.
https://www.tek.com/-/media/sites/default/files/u811871/hamm...