h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Harking back to post 12, two corrections:

1) Benzine does not get its name from Karl Benz, or from anybody else called Benz. The name derives from benzene. Benzene is an alternative name of gum benzoin, which in turn is a corruption of the Arabic 'luban jawi' (frankincense of Java).

2) There never was such a person as Mercedes Benz. The Mercedes in the car's name comes from the daughter of Emil Jellinek, an Austrian businessman and racing driver who went into business with Daimler-Maybach. He changed his name to Jellinek-Mercedes got Maybach to agree that the cars he'd been involved with should be branded 'Mercedes'.

Interesting old thread you've revived!

Perhaps worth mentioning is 'the Ameche' which is what Americans
called the telphone after actor Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell in a Hollywood biography of the telephone's inventor. Up to that point most people had just called it 'the Bell'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Ameche

"... as the title character in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939). It led to the use of the word, "ameche," as slang for telephone in common catchphrases, as noted by Mike Kilen in the Iowa City Gazette (December 8, 1993): "The film prompted a generation to call people to the telephone with the phrase: 'You're wanted on the Ameche.'"

Thankfully, this was a generational fad and has likely faded out except in octogenarian circles.


~jwf~

For the record when Don Ameche died, the phone thing was about the first thing said in his obituaries.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-978591.html

Honda - Soichiro Honda, the firm´s founder. He started at virtually zero after WWII, putting Army surplus stationary engines into pushbikes, giving a transport starvea nation´s workers getting a job outside walking distance. In many parts of Asia a Honda tiddler still is the synonym for "our family´s first motorized vehicle". You wouldn´t want to try the race car he built for himself, though - surplus, too. A 24 litre aircraft engine. to him.