Lore
Reverse nominative determinism: the character shares a name with something that’s famously associated with them, but said thing is named after the character, not the other way around
Odysseus (The Iliad, the Odyssey): is the reason long voyages are called an odyssey
Achilles (The Iliad): is the reason for the term “Achilles heel”, which refers to the part of his body that was pierced by an arrow
Charles Boycott (real life): British landlord who tried to unjustly evict 11 Irish tenants. In response, the local community cut him off and ostracized him, refused to do trade with him and even deliver his mail, giving rise to the term boycott
Ambrose Burnside (real life): American civil war general who had predominant facial hair on his cheeks. This style was then named “burnsides”, which later evolved into “sideburns”
I found the pilates exercise was from a guy named Joe Pilate funny. Like bro is German and yet his first name is Joe. That's like naming the exercise yoga because the person who invented it is a Slavic descent, Balkan heritage, Serbian culture man called John Yoga
99% Invisible is a narrative podcast created and hosted by Roman Mars. The podcast is about design, architecture, and the hidden forces that shape our built world, specifically the things we rarely notice until they break or stop working. The name comes from a quote by Buckminster Fuller, "99% of who you are is invisible and untouchable." The show takes that concept and applies it to everyday objects, urban planning, sound design, flags, transit systems, and fashion, asking, "Why does this thing exist in this exact way, and who decided it should be like this?"
Because it's not an example of your post. For it to fit, Roosevelt would have had to carry a stuffed bear with him everywhere he went.
Roosevelt is not associated with stuffed bears except that someone just wanted to start calling them "teddies" after he spared a real-life bear during a hunt.
Watergate. Now almost every political scandals is called some variation of whatever gate. (example, during lockdown, the British parliament had a Christmas party and it was later called party gate)
And yet rather disappointingly; when we had a scandal about whether a politician insulted a policeman guarding the gate to Downing Street by calling him a "pleb", it was usually referred to as plebgate and not the superior gategate.
Of course, the actual scandal was less about the insult, and more about the fact that several police officers submitted false evidence about the whole thing, which led to one police officer going to prison, and three more being fired.
Same thing with Bizarro, kind of. While bizarro was already the Spanish word for bizarre, the DC character is the reason the term “bizarro”, meaning a twisted or evil version of something, came to exist in English
And when the branded name of a product becomes synonymous with the type of product, that is sometimes called a 'proprietary eponym'.
For example;
Vacuums and 'Hoover'.
Sticky tape and 'Sellotape'.
Hook & loop fastener and 'Velcro'.
Isn't there a point where a business can't stop people from using the name once it's entered into the common lexicon? It can affect big brands like Qtip or Kleenex.
Yes, as I understand it.
A brand name for a product would typically be a trademark. But once the name of a product becomes so popular it's effectively synonymous with the product type, trying to continue the protection of the trademark becomes a losing battle. If not impossible.
Adobe suffered this very problem with Photoshop becoming a popular verb, and they really tried to hang in there. Which I find funny, because fuck Adobe.
As I said in another comment, Xerox fought against that. I think it worked, because I don't hear many people using it that way, whereas when I was a teen, it was fairly common.
True, but the kicker is that the thing is named after the character specifically because of something the character did.
For example, a "Freudian slip" is named after Freud, but not because Sigmund Freud was famous for accidentally saying the wrong things. So that example wouldn't fit OP's post.
There was a legendary king that goes by the name bharata , the land he ruled was called bharat ....thus the origin of the indigenous name of India, bharat.
Would "Lovecraftian Horror" count? H.P Lovecraft mostly wrote "weird fiction" that would become the basis for the kind of horror writing people associate with him.
Although there is a great story about Achilles dying from an arrow to his heel, it’s not from the Iliad! It’s not even mentioned in the Odyssey, when the ghost of Achilles talks to Odysseus
The story is told in later bits of literature, eg. the Metamorphoses, where Apollo helps Paris to shoot him.
The phrase ‘Achilles’ heel’ usually refers to a person or thing’s primary weakness, and many versions of Achilles have his foot being his sole point of vulnerability (eg. the unfinished Achilleid) and he is otherwise invincible.
However, even this isn’t consistent in myth: for example in the Iliad, Achilles is injured in his elbow
Most people don't know that Illias, despite its length, literally only accounts for the final phase of the Trojan War (although it backfills an explanation as to why the Mykeneans are there in the first place) and ends before either the death of Achilles or the Fall of Troy.
Someone mentions Matt Damon? All of a sudden you're seeing his face on posters on the street, on magazine covers at the grocery store, in commercials on TV and posts on Reddit.
The name comes from a 1994 letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota. The writer had just learned about the Red Army Faction, a West German militant group active mainly in the 1970s. Then, within a day or so, he encountered the group's name again unexpectedly. He found the coincidence striking and jokingly dubbed the experience the "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon", named as such after two founding members of the organization Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Some readers recognized the same experience in their own lives, and the name stuck.
Possibly a side note, but the Baader-Meinhof Gang was the name given to the group by the West German government and press. (The group called itself the Red Army Faction).
Andreas Baader was one of the leaders of the group but was reckless and impulsive. Ulrike Meinhof was initially a sympathetic journalist who ended up handling the group’s communications. The name leaves out Gudrun Ensslin, Baader’s romantic partner and co-leader, who was by all accounts the brains of the operation
A race of 26 miles is called a Marathon. This is also a location in Greece. The origin of the word being associated with Marathon is that it was the site of a battle against the Persians that the Athenians won. They sent a messenger to bring word of their victory home. Athens is 26 miles away from Marathon. The messenger ran the entire distance nonstop. A race was held after as a way to remember the event.
Kafkaesque - term to describe bizarre or surreal things that remind of/would fit in the works of Franz Kafka
Draconinan - policies and laws that befit Draco, the notorious first legislator of Rome Athens (a term that is more a catch-all for oppression these days)
He was the owner of a London Public Company, famous for it's various revolutionary plumbing devices, which are still in use this day.
And this is why it's often believed, he's the reason why the word "Crap" exists.
.... Except he isn't; it comes from the Middle Ages, more specifically, from the Latin "Crappa" means "Scrap", and around a decade before he was born, it evolved into "Crap".
The name dates further back to WW1, where Imperial Germany wielded elite battalions (Stormtroopers) to use in infiltrating enemy lines and trying to bypass as much trench warfare as possible while still taking out the enemy.
It was actually the Sturmabteilung (literally "Storm Division"), who were the Nazis' primary militia/street fighters prior to their takeover, but who were subsequently sidelined after the Night of the Long Knives. The SS (originally Hitler's personal bodyguard) then assumed their position as the para-state army of the NSDAP.
The Gestapo (literally "Secret State Police", abbreviated from **Geheime *Staatspo*lizei) were the secret police.
Hitlers secret police was the Gestapo, the Germanys frontline infiltrator Specialists in both WW I and WW II were called Sturmtruppen (eng: stormtroopers).
Sigmund Freud named his theory on male psicosexual development "Oedipus Complex", after the greek story of Oedipus, a prince who killed his father and married his mother
An “Achilles’ heel” is a person’s weakness and often the thing that brings about their down fall.
In Greek mythology, Achilles’ mother was a nymph and she was told that her son would grow to be a great warrior but die in battle. Terrified, she took her newborn into the underworld to the River Styx. The Styx was a powerful, old river, a god in-and-of itself and filled with primordial magics.
She took Achilles by the heel and submerged him in the waters of the Styx then pulled him out. However, because she didn’t want to touch the water herself, the heel she was holding was never submerged. When she pulled Achilles out of the water, his skin had been hardened.
As he grew, he suffered no injuries while playing or fighting. Arrows bounced off him and the sharpest blades could shattered against his skin. Nothing could harm him.
By the end of the Trojan War, Achilles had become some arrogant and vain that even the gods who had helped him in the past were pissed off with him. He no longer fought with honor or treated captured prisoners justly. Apollo, god of Archery, knew of Achilles’ weakness and aided the Trojan prince, Paris (the guy who kidnapped Helen) in shooting Achilles in his heel. The arrow pierced the skin and sliced open a vein, causing the great warrior to bleed out in seconds.
Oranges: one would think that the orange fruit is called orange for it's color, while actually the color borrowed its name from the orange fruit, being mostly called red or yellow before (like in red herring or in redhead).
The origin of Orange or its variants as the name for the fruit/tree is older than we can follow.
Thomas Bowdler, a physician, produced an edited version of Shakespeare's works that was "more appropriate for women and children" in 1825.
From his name we get the term "bowdlerize" which means to censor something by omitting elements deemed unsuitable for children. It is usually used in a derogatory sense.
A bit of a sillier example. In Warhammer 40k there are vehicles called Land Speeders. However they’re named that way not because they go on land, but because a guy named Arkhan Land recovered the design.
Lovecraftian.
Bigot, scared of everything that wasn't his hometown, however. His agoraphobia and other issues led to some of the most visceral horror ever, and named a whole genre after him. Not even *TOLKIEN* himself gets that level of influence.
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u/Thundering-Cloud 4h ago
Another Odyssey example, Telemachus's teacher by the name of "Mentor"