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Comment by Rygian | Hacker News Reader

French drains should be part of the "Unexpectedly Eponymous" list

https://notes.rolandcrosby.com/posts/unexpectedly-eponymous/

Fun fact, in the French speaking part of Canada, "French drain" are fully translated to "Drain français" because of this quirk even though we don't usually translate proper nouns.

Ben ken toé, un drain français n'a rien à voir avec les français.

Good point—added to the Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponyms_(A%E2%80%93K)#...

Spearheaded of course by the late E. P. Onymous, may he rest in peace.

Great site! (though Unilever seems like a stretch, & gasoline is extremely contested).

This reminds me, my partner recently bought me some "Coffey Whiskey" because I like coffee, which led to my own discovery of another one of these (albeit one requiring a spelling oversight).

The coding language Julia; perhaps Ada should have been named Lovelace then?

Julia doesn't count because it wasn't named after a person.

Even then, neither of those would fit the theme of the list above because they aren't named after their inventors (even though Ada is technically an eponym).

I think narrowing the theme of the list to just inventors is more an accidental result of the author's selection rather than their intended theme - eponyms seems to be the theme.

The point is they're unexpected. Elo is a great example, people tend to assume this chess rating system is an abbreviation, but it's somebody's name.

It's not unexpected that Ada is named after Ada. It is unexpected that PageRank is named after a person named Page rather than web pages. It may seem less unexpected if you happen to know who Larry Page is, but the same could be said for Glen Bell, if you knew who he was then it's "obvious" why the business is named Taco Bell right?

Wow what a brilliant blog post. Full of OMG moments, not least Max Factor!

Ah, like Arkhan Land and his Land Raider.

I don’t think it qualifies. This drain is intentionally named after Mr. French.

The would be the whole reason of it making the list. Most people would think it was named after the country or something not Mr. French.

Got it. Price club and Page rank are better examples because they make sense and don’t feel arbitrary even if the name had no relation.

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