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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. - Bake

by air7 6y ago

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.”

bb2018 6y ago
According to Snopes, the song "Sweet Home Alabama" was actually inspired by a radio commercial for "Sweet Homes" that had aired decades earlier. Full circle.
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  You fell for a Snopes TRoLL. They made that story up. Mobile homes are called that because they can move. There was never a mobile home company called "sweet homes", and the industry does not originate in Mobile.
  - mherdeg 6y ago
    The ultimate troll entry for me on Snopes is: > So how did this claim arise? In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of “facts” that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous “facts,” among which was the statistic cited above about the average person’s swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst’s propagation of this false “fact” has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet. This is NOT in their "TroLL" section -- it is not clearly marked as being a fake fact. See https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/ . Yet if you do the homework -- other people have, and I have tried to reproduce it myself -- there is no such source. See https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/is-a-writer-named-lisa-holst-responsible-for-the-belief-that-everyone-eats-eight https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/is-a-write... for example. This Snopes article cites a column reportedly called "Reading Is Believing" from a periodical called "PC Professional", page 71, date 7 January 1993. I was unable to find the existence of any such periodical although there is "PC professionnel", published in German, ISSN 0939-5822, whose archives seem to only be available in German libraries (and I have not reviewed those). However, I was able to find in the Cornell University archives, a quarterly periodical called the Cornell Engineer, which carried a column by a student columnist dated April 1992 (Volume 56 number 2, page 24, column title "Stress and Strain", author Margot Anne-Stephanie Vigeant '94). That seems to predate the January 1993 citation given in the Snopes article, and the 1992 student-publication column text says in part > My first topic for this issue is worries. I've decided that there are just too many well adjusted, un-paranoid people in this school (NOT), so I've decided to wreck their peace of mind by sharing a list of my favorite worries with them. These are the kind of things that just jump into your mind right before you're about to fall asleep - horrible little night gremlins whose goal it is to keep you up just a little bit longer. So here they are, hope you can sleep after this: > The average person swallows eight spiders while sleeping, in their lifetime. What if all eight show up tonight? Meanwhile the source that Snopes apparently made up, Lisa Birgit Holst, is an anagram for "This is a big troll". It's just odd. Their debunking contains a pointless lie; there is a real citation available they chose not to use.
    - msla 6y ago
      Gotta wonder about their other debunkings, which is the whole point, really: They salt their site with lies to keep you on your toes.
pantaloony 6y ago
I like Mobile home especially because of affects how you write it, and how you say it.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  The joys of English… Where the exact same word can have two different pronunciations depending on the context.
tomcorrigan 6y ago
For the benefit of anyone else reading fabrication is the key word in the origin of “Mobile homes”
hannasanarion 6y ago
The Mobile Homes one is a fake story made up by Snopes for their TRoLL section. It's not true. There was no business called Sweet Homes in Mobile, and the prefab housing industry did not originate there. Manufactured houses really did grow out of the camper/trailer industry. The name "mobile home" is a holdover from when they had wheels. The first companies to deliver prefab houses to set on foundations already had thriving businesses making trailer-homes or other prefab structures (like those seen on construction sites)
darkerside 6y ago
I believe French drains were invented by an engineer named James French
BerislavLopac 6y ago
Lynyrd Skynyrd themselves should be on that list.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
divbzero 6y ago
Another food item: – Caesar salad — named after Caesar Cardini, a restauranteur in San Diego and Tijuana [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_salad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_salad
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  I don't think it's unexpectedly named after a person, but it may qualify as named after an unexpected person.
  - madcaptenor 6y ago
    Nachos are also named after a person - a maitre d' named Ignacio, who needed to come up with something to serve one night after his chef had already left). The word "Nazi" comes from the same root, a nickname for Ignatz used to make fun of Bavarian peasants.

by air7 6y ago

bb2018 6y ago

According to Snopes, the song "Sweet Home Alabama" was actually inspired by a radio commercial for "Sweet Homes" that had aired decades earlier. Full circle.

hannasanarion 6y ago
You fell for a Snopes TRoLL. They made that story up. Mobile homes are called that because they can move. There was never a mobile home company called "sweet homes", and the industry does not originate in Mobile.
- mherdeg 6y ago
  The ultimate troll entry for me on Snopes is: > So how did this claim arise? In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of “facts” that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous “facts,” among which was the statistic cited above about the average person’s swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst’s propagation of this false “fact” has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet. This is NOT in their "TroLL" section -- it is not clearly marked as being a fake fact. See https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/ . Yet if you do the homework -- other people have, and I have tried to reproduce it myself -- there is no such source. See https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/is-a-writer-named-lisa-holst-responsible-for-the-belief-that-everyone-eats-eight https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/is-a-write... for example. This Snopes article cites a column reportedly called "Reading Is Believing" from a periodical called "PC Professional", page 71, date 7 January 1993. I was unable to find the existence of any such periodical although there is "PC professionnel", published in German, ISSN 0939-5822, whose archives seem to only be available in German libraries (and I have not reviewed those). However, I was able to find in the Cornell University archives, a quarterly periodical called the Cornell Engineer, which carried a column by a student columnist dated April 1992 (Volume 56 number 2, page 24, column title "Stress and Strain", author Margot Anne-Stephanie Vigeant '94). That seems to predate the January 1993 citation given in the Snopes article, and the 1992 student-publication column text says in part > My first topic for this issue is worries. I've decided that there are just too many well adjusted, un-paranoid people in this school (NOT), so I've decided to wreck their peace of mind by sharing a list of my favorite worries with them. These are the kind of things that just jump into your mind right before you're about to fall asleep - horrible little night gremlins whose goal it is to keep you up just a little bit longer. So here they are, hope you can sleep after this: > The average person swallows eight spiders while sleeping, in their lifetime. What if all eight show up tonight? Meanwhile the source that Snopes apparently made up, Lisa Birgit Holst, is an anagram for "This is a big troll". It's just odd. Their debunking contains a pointless lie; there is a real citation available they chose not to use.
  - msla 6y ago
    Gotta wonder about their other debunkings, which is the whole point, really: They salt their site with lies to keep you on your toes.

pantaloony 6y ago

I like Mobile home especially because of affects how you write it, and how you say it.

jobigoud 6y ago
The joys of English… Where the exact same word can have two different pronunciations depending on the context.

tomcorrigan 6y ago

For the benefit of anyone else reading fabrication is the key word in the origin of “Mobile homes”

hannasanarion 6y ago

The Mobile Homes one is a fake story made up by Snopes for their TRoLL section. It's not true. There was no business called Sweet Homes in Mobile, and the prefab housing industry did not originate there. Manufactured houses really did grow out of the camper/trailer industry. The name "mobile home" is a holdover from when they had wheels. The first companies to deliver prefab houses to set on foundations already had thriving businesses making trailer-homes or other prefab structures (like those seen on construction sites)

darkerside 6y ago

I believe French drains were invented by an engineer named James French

BerislavLopac 6y ago

Lynyrd Skynyrd themselves should be on that list.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

divbzero 6y ago

Another food item: – Caesar salad — named after Caesar Cardini, a restauranteur in San Diego and Tijuana [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_salad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_salad

dragonwriter 6y ago
I don't think it's unexpectedly named after a person, but it may qualify as named after an unexpected person.
- madcaptenor 6y ago
  Nachos are also named after a person - a maitre d' named Ignacio, who needed to come up with something to serve one night after his chef had already left). The word "Nazi" comes from the same root, a nickname for Ignatz used to make fun of Bavarian peasants.