You might look at this thing... ![[Pasted image 20250514160831.png]] ...and think Yes, That Does Raid Land. But it's actually just named after a guy called Land: ![[Pasted image 20250514155925.png]] Warhammer 40,000 is full of these kinds of things, which 1. makes a lot of sense given that it's going for a 'fallen civilisation' / dark ages type thing where origins of words have gotten mangled over time. But... 2. ...it's also sometimes the result of "silly" retcons. A more recent example is that the Space Marines are the Adeptus Astartes, which you might think is just funny Space Latin, but no, it turns out: ![[Pasted image 20250514160550.png]] (The comment is sass rather than well-sourced fact - I don't know that it's been confirmed specifically as a retcon by Games Workshop.) But this one's also instructive because it's like a double-back-formation or the causation is confounded or something - the underlying cause remains (astartes being ~star-warriors) but now with an extra step (it's a *person* who's named after ~star-warrior). And these things happen all the time in real life as well! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888725 A sample, including some that you might know but others might not: - The Student's t-test is named after a guy who used the pseudonym Student - Sideburns are named after the American Civil War general Ambrose Burnside - German Chocolate Cake is named after the English-American chocolate maker Samuel German - The Elo rating system (most common in chess) is named after its creator Arpad Elo, despite the fact it's often stylised in all-caps (ELO) as though it were an acronym - new2628 says: "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." There's also "lynching", which I discovered through Scott Alexander's review of [*Albion's Seed*](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/) was "named after western Virginian settler William Lynch". As Terry Pratchett puts it in *Feet of Clay*: "Colonel Shrapnel wasn't blown up, M. Guillotin died with his head on, Colonel Gatling wasn't shot. If it hadn't been for Sir William Blunt-Instrument, the rumour would never have got started."[^1] rachelshu notes: > 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) I think there's a weaker form of nominative determinism going on - call this Unexpected (2)(a) - where the appropriateness of the (person's) name for the thing is just causing that name *to* stick. Anyway, I just think this is neat, and whenever it comes up I always think *Land Raider*. [^1]: Trying to remember this reference also meant I found the surprisingly morbid [Wikipedia list of inventors killed by their own inventions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_invention)