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Comment by russdill | Hacker News Reader

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russdill·

I don't think you're getting the idea.

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What is the idea?

How are these different from e.g. erlang, elo or shrapnel - all featured on the page?

It ain’t! Don’t worry these are good!

"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.

I swear I correct people about Elo vs ELO two to three times a year.

And yes I am a great party guest!

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.

Santorum literally screams eponymous neologism.

Vibra-, idio-, membrano-, aero-, etc. are existing or obvious prefixes. Sax- is not. All I can think of is Saxon, but saxophones are pretty recent, so that doesn't match.

Sousaphone is another -phone that's pretty obviously named after a person. Less well known but still pretty obvious are rothphone, heckelphone, sarrusophone, sudrophone.

All my life, I thought "sadism" had to do with the word "sad"!

In the case of shrapnel I guess I always assumed it was derived from some World War era Germanic word for metal scrap/shards, so that it's just named after a British dude is pretty unexpected to me.

They seem entirely expected, or at least not unexpected. Reading them doesn't lead you to assume some alternate obvious but wrong explanation. Imagine learning (made up example) that the musical triangle was named for it's inventor, "Stuart Triangle".

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