The story continues in the Netherlands, where a company licensed the Keller and Knappich design to produce their own trucks. Of course, they released it under their own names: Klinkenberg & Koster, abbreviated as KLIKO, which they too stamped in large font on their trucks and bins. And today "kliko" is the common Dutch name for the wheelie bin.

I guess only in those parts of the country where Kliko had a large market share at some point. The Otto brand name is so strong in the east that they have no idea what a Kliko is.

The most common word in Japanese for “stapler” is hochikisu or hotchikisu, which seems to come from the name of the E.F. Hotchkiss Company [1], an American manufacturer whose staplers were imported to Japan in the early 20th century. Some Japanese sources [2] say that the word comes from Benjamin Hotchkiss [3], an inventor of machine guns, and that is what I learned many years ago, but that etymology apparently has not been documented [4].

[1] https://connecticutmills.org/find/details/e.h.-hotchkiss-co

[2] https://gally.net/temp/20240222hotchikisugogensetsu.jpg

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_B._Hotchkiss

[4] https://wis.max-ltd.co.jp/about/company/trivia/h_story/inven...

More: https://jisho.org/forum/5d132f2ed5dda71944000054-origin-of-n...

In Switzerland, we call staplers Bostitch, which happens to be the name of an US company that (used to or still does) manufacture them.

X rays are called Rentogen in Japanese, after Wilhelm Röntgen, who produced/detected them first.

Same in Czech, tbh it's possible that English is the outlier here

English is definitely not an outlier. In french it's Rayon X

I had a moment to check and it’s actually interesting - looks like the world is split in two. Looking at a few languages closer to home (for me) we have:

X-ray-like: English, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, Portuguese

Röntgen-like: German, Danish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Russian, Hungarian

There’s way more of each than I’ve listed, of course. I just picked a few languages

X-Strahlen (X-Rays) is the name Röntgen invented for his discovery :)

People in Turkey definitely don't use X-ray, they use Röntgen. Same for Azerbaijan.

X rays are called Röntgen rays in German, which is where the Japanese got it from, like many medical terms.

"Sabiro" for a suit comes from "Savile Row", a street in London famous for its tailor shops, which in turn is named after Dorothy Boyle, Countess of Burlington and Cork (née Savile).

Funny enough, the French word for a garbage can is also named after someone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Poubelle the prefect who made the use of garbage containers mandatory in Paris.

Continuing with the trend, the Polish word for outhouse is sławojka, named after Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski, a prime minister who is responsible for making them mandatory in the countryside in the 1920s, and apparently touring the country to check how sanitary they are. https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82awojka

Pretty much the same can be said in Italian about public urinals and the emperor Vespasian(o).

Incidentally, 'kuk' is a Norwegian word, a somewhat pejorative synonym for 'penis', but almost as versatile as the four-letter word - it can be used as an adjective, a verb, an adverb, a noun etc.

Saying that 'something is kuka/kuket' means it is messed up beyond repair.

Even as I approach my fifties, I have to stifle a chuckle every time I see a KUKA robot. Kids never really grow up, I guess.

As for things named after people, the probably most prominent example in Norwegian today is the so-called 'Brustadbu', named after former minister of children and families, Sylvia Brustad.

The government she was in introduced a new law governing opening hours for convenience stores, effectively barring stores above 100sqm (1,100 sqft) from being open on Sundays.

Predictably, this gave rise to a lot of stores measuring 99.9sqm, colloquially referred to as 'Brustadbu'/'Brustad sheds'.

Kuka in Croatian means "hook" so at least their robotic arms are somewhat aptly named.

incidentally, "kuka" (or actually "kúka") means to poop in icelandic

Interesting! "Kuki" in Hungarian is a children's word for penis. I assume it's a nickname for "kukac", meaning worm/maggot (which, btw, is the same word we use for the @ symbol).

Kuk = Cock, surely

Interesting, it seems to be the same KUKA that know produces robots

Don’t google kuk(a) in Sweden

Interesting that this occured during the k.u.k. monarchy.

Continuing the trash theme, "Dumpster" comes from the Dempster family name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dempster_Brothers

In Switzerland, there is a company Ochsner, which also manufactured the household bins to go with the hoppers, and patented that. Those bins became mandatory in quite a bunch of municipalities.

Eventually, garbage sacks were introduced like everywhere else, the bins became obsolete, though I still see hoppers from them, so they still make those.

Long story short, the bins (called "Ochsnerchübu") are gone, but the madness of patenting a freaking trashcan resulted in one of Switzerland's most successful bands having named themselves "Patent Ochsner".

This happened in Poland with long-haul trucks, which we often call tiry (plural of tir), with TIR being an abbreviation for "Transports Internationaux Routiers"[1], an international treaty covering the transport of goods by road. Vehicles using the provisions of this treaty must have a plate with TIR written on it, and so the world entered popular usage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIR_Convention