What's in a name...
Technorati tags: Humor, Wikipedia, Brandnames, Etymology
...or yet another reason why Wikipedia is the tastiest creation since Liquid Paper
This post started with Walski looking up brandnames from the Netherlands - no, not to boycott - to see what everyday products "concerned" Muslims would have to forego if they really wanted to boycott anything and everything Dutch.
Instead, Walski found this Wikipedia entry, which lists the etymology of brandnames - which lead to other pages with general name etymologies. Interesting stuff to read through, if you have a Sunday to kill...
For example, Walski finds out that Bridgestone (as in the tire manufacturer) is actually a literal translation (and transposition) of part of the founder's name Shojiro Ishibashi, from Japanese to English [Ishibashi (石橋) literally means "stone bridge"]. And Walski thought that it had something to do with the English race track of the same name...
DHL, for instance, is not an abbreviation of "Dua Hari Lambat" (Bahasa Malaysia, meaning "Two Days Late"), but is actually something a lot more mundane - the initials of the three founders' last names: Adrian Dalsey, Larry Hillblom, and Robert Lynn. In case you've ever wondered...
You also find out that exotic brandnames, like Häagen-Dazs (one of Walski's favorite ice creams, by the way), has no meaning whatsoever. Or that seemingly meaningless names like Mozilla actually stands for something.
And that TuCows have as much to do with grazing farm animals, as Apache has to do with American Indians. Also, we now know for sure that there's no paper contained in Liquid Paper. None whatsoever.
Walski's Sunday filler-post post footnote: For the record, Walski has never tasted Liquid Paper, but expects it to taste just as awful as turpentine would. And no, Walski's never tasted turpentine, either... Life, in general, is too short to spend being serious all the damn time.
