There's a type of bacteria that infects caterpillars and produces a toxin that makes them lose all rigidity. The toxin is called MCF.

MCF stand for Makes Caterpillars Floppy

Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15009026/

Physics is a mixed bag with this stuff. Gell-Mann came up with the name quarks after a line from Finnegan's Wake because Joyce referenced them as coming in three. It was a nonsense word inserted just to rhyme with Mark, Park, etc, so its pronunciation in physics isn't even correct, but it was fun and physicists were just having a good time with it.

Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

Then we got the strange/charm and top/bottom (which was originally the beauty/truth, so bullet dodged there) so the quarks really got all the fun names. Strong Force physics in general gets the good stuff: Axions were named after a detergent because they helped "clean up" the strong CP-violation problem of the standard model. Fantastic, no notes.

Neutrinos (my field of study), had so much potential for fun, stupid naming that was squandered. The neutrino was originally proposed with the name "neutron" by Pauli, but then the actual neutron was discovered and observed first, so the name got pinched. To remedy this, the electron neutrino was dubbed "neutrino" or little neutron (they didn't know that other flavors of neutrino existed). Meanwhile, the muon neutrino was originally supposed to be the neutretto (before they realized that the neutral leptons were related by the different particle generations), so we could have had a world where each generation of neutral lepton was just another combination of neutron + diminutive italian suffix.

1. Neutrino
2. Neutretto/neutronetto
3. Neutrello/neutronello

Then, when the mass eigenstates were confirmed, we could have diversified and gone with big suffixes to indicate that neutrinos have mass.

1. Neutroni
2. Neutrachione/neutronachione
3. Neutrozzo/neutronozzo

But noooooo, particle physics decided to just give neutrinos the lamest possible names, electron/muon/tau neutrinos for flavor states and m_1/m_2/m_3 neutrino for mass states. I am ashamed of my predecessors for what they've done.

Don't even get me started on the J/Psi debacle...

To be honest, love the “Ferrous Wheel” pun. It’s too good.

These are hilarious. I NEED MORE!

Fun fact (not really) about Nim: he and the other ASL chimps were HORRIBLY abused. Basically every single one of them.

And it was all for nothing, not a single bit of evidence shows that teaching chimps ASL worked and allowed any form of actual communication.

Yes, even Koko.

https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4

After looking this up, TIL that Knuckles is an echidna. I had no idea!

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/N/nybble.html

Worth noting that at the time of documentation a half-byte was a nybble, and the more mundane spelling came along later

edit: ooooo I just remembered the Cox-Zucker algorithm too! Evidently the two guys behind the algo only decided to work together because of their last names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%E2%80%93Zucker_machine

Meanwhile psychologists just name things as exactly blandly as they can. There's a neat phenomenon where a relationship can immediately be viewed as deeper and more connected, merely by one of the individuals sharing deeply personal information. It even works at the very first interaction. In other words, if someone tends to overshare, or blurt out info about themselves, we measure their blirtasiousness and its effect on relationships. Not even kidding. I think the folks who came up with it were Scottish, which is why the blirt rather than blurt.

I've learnt about byte/nibble over 30 years ago and just now got the pun.

It’s a nybble…

Been in a lab meeting (biochemists) with a group who were naming a new method they made. They started with the acronym and decided what it would stand for second.

17, 18, and 19 on the periodic table spell out ClArK, guess what's below 18. Krypton. I can't remember which one came first, but superman is baked into the periodic table and I can't help but remember that everytime I think about chemistry.

In quantum mechanics, there are types of vectors that are written like |a>, which is called a "ket", and their dual vectors as . This is called the Bra-Ket-Notation.

Now I want to become a scientist so I can name something after a pun.

People are really awful at naming things.

Some German nerd thought it was cool while they discovered some new receptor so they called it "toll" (German for cool/awesome). Computer science is full of names that are kind of funny if you already know the particular area but are total gibberish if you're trying learn it. We're not even good at naming humans. The default is to either pick one of the names that's common in your culture. When people deviate from that you get a huge number of "special" names.

We need to put this in the hands of experts. I'm gonna propose a new field, "nameology". Those folks will do a bunch of research into names that make sense. How do we best name things so they completely and unambiguously label them in a way that's easy to remember and use? Then they can run around and give non stupid names to all the things.