Exactly What It Says On The Tin / Real Life

Exactly What It Says on the Tin in real life.

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Animals

• Biologists aren't very imaginative either, so there are lots of species that do this. Like the brown long-eared bat, which is a brown bat with long ears.
• Anteaters are mammals that eat ants and are even specialized at doing so. However, they're also just as likely to eat termites, a species more closely related to cockroaches than ants.
• Woodpeckers are birds that peck the wood of trees to eat the grubs within.
• The Welsh Corgi dog, consisting of two breeds, is this in the Welsh language they were named from. "Cor" is Welsh for "dwarf", "gi" is Welsh for "dog", and corgis are pretty notoriously short dogs with stubby legs.

Astronomy

• The planet Earth is named after a synonym for the word "ground" because anyone on the surface is standing on exactly that.
• The Moon is the only moon of the planet Earth. This is something of a reversal in etymology, though, as the term "moon" comes from the Moon of the Earth. Some people insist on calling it "Luna" - which still means moon. Contrary to popular misconception, the scientific name for the Moon in English actually is "the Moon", not Luna. (It is officially called "Luna" in Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Latin—though hardly anyone talks astronomy in Latin, and in Spanish and Italian it takes the definite article "la" so it's more fully "la Luna" in both languages).
• The Sun is the only star in the planet Earth's solar system. As with the Moon, the term "sun" to refer to whatever star is at the center of a given solar system is derived from the Earth's Sun. Similar to the Moon, the word "solar" derives from Sol, the Latin word for the Sun and was co-opted to refer to other stars long after it was discovered that they were more similar than we could have previously known.
• Astronomers aren't very original when it comes to naming their telescopes, leading them to name them exactly what they are. There's the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona which is a binocular telescope that is indeed quite large, the Very Large Telescope in Chile which uses four telescopes to generate one very large virtual telescope, the descriptively named Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii, and the (canceled) Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. Parodied by xkcd. Radio astronomers follow the same pattern; arrays of telescope dishes have such creative names as Very Large Array, Very Small Array, and Square Kilometer Array. Many of them are just named after the mountain they're built on, or the nearest town.

Language

• Thanks to compound words, German terms are often very descriptive, e.g. Bauchspeicheldrüse (belly saliva gland) - pancreas
  • Zeug is a general term meaning "device, equipment, machine, tool" and sometimes even "fabric" or "weapon".
    • Werkzeug (work-devices) - tools (note that Zeug is an uncountable noun)
    • Schlagzeug (hit-device) - drum kit
    • Feuerzeug (fire-device) - lighter
    • Flugzeug (flight-device) - airplane
• If you know the Greek and Latin roots of words, you will see that a lot of words mean exactly what they're supposed to mean. For example, "phlebotomy", which comes from the Greek phlebo-, meaning "vein", and -tomy, meaning "cutting, incision" of an organ and "excision" of an object. Yep, that's pretty much what phlebotomists do.

Medicine

• Many disorders are this since it's helpful and descriptive. Sadly, they only qualify if you know what the medical Latin means. Similarly, many internal body parts are like this, too, making life much easier for anatomy and physiology students.
• Chronic fatigue syndrome (ME), in which one is generally permanently tired with all or many of the effects that come with that.
• Many enzymes have names that just describe their functions, with an added "-ase" suffix to indicate that they're enzymes. Examples include RNA polymerase (which produces RNA via polymerisation) and reverse transcriptase (which produces a DNA strand through reverse transcription). Some make it even clearer what they are and what they do, such as citrate cleavage enzyme.
• A herbal supplement called "horny goat weed" is used to treat and promote exactly what you'd expect.

Places

• The Rocky Mountains of North America are mountains made out of rock.
• The Island of Hawaii, otherwise known as the Big Island. It's the largest island in the chain by a wide margin.
• And the Rio Grande (Spanish for "big river") is a big river that separates the USA and Mexico. Interestingly, several historic native tribal names for it also translate to "big river".
• The name Mississippi means... yes, you guessed it, "big river" in the Ojibwe language.
• Rivers Rhenus (Rhine) and Danuvius (Danube) which formed the borders of the Roman Empire. Both mean simply "river" in Gallic and Proto-Indo-European.
• The Grand Canyon is a really big canyon. The Red River, between Texas and Oklahoma, where the ground is red shale that colors the water a distinct red. Red Rock Canyon in Oklahoma where the sides are made of... well, the examples go on and on.
• Southern Alberta's Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, where, according to Blackfoot legend, a young man made the... unwise... decision to stand beneath it to get a good view as buffalo were being jumped off it, and was then found under a pile of dead buffalo with, you guessed it, his head smashed in.
• The water on Huanghe (Yellow River) is... well, yellow because of the silt carried. It flows into the Yellow Sea, which is distinctly yellow because of that said silt.
• Polynesia means "many islands" in Greek. It is exactly that- many islands spread out across a large portion of the Pacific Ocean.
• Micronesia means "small islands" in Greek. It is made up of several small islands scattered across the northern reaches of Oceana. The largest of the 2100 islands, Guam, makes up about 20% of the total land mass but is 1/5 the size of Rhode Island. This majority of the rest are less than a square mile each.
• The Archipelago Sea between Finland and Sweden, with over 40,000 (!) islands, islets and skerries. Known in Finnish as Saaristomeri (Island-full Sea) and in Swedish as Skärgårsdshavet (Skerry Garden Sea).
• There is a great sandy desert in Australia called the Great Australian desert.
• The Central African Republic is a republic in central Africa.
  • The Republic of South Africa just so happens to be the southernmost republic in Africa.
• Gulfport, Mississippi is a port city on the Gulf of Mexico.
• Inaccessible Island (part of the Tristan da Cunha archipelago) is an island in the middle of nowhere (Tristan da Cunha itself, population less than 300, is the most remote inhabited location on Earth with the nearest neighbours 2400km away on St. Helena) that's inaccessible to humans.^note It's not totally inaccessible, people have been there and 2 Russian brothers lived there for a couple years in the 1870s. It's still pretty difficult though, being that it's in basically the middle of nowhere in rough seas and has a high cliff face on all sides. The island is inaccessible in the legal sense, as it is a protected nature reserve and permits to travel there are only granted for scientific research.
• The Underground Gardens of Fresno, California are gardens that are planted below ground level.
• That Place Across the Street from the Sports Arena was a bar located across the street from the San Diego Sports Arena.
• The Harlem River Lift Bridge is a vertical lift bridge that carries MTA Metro North trains^note Another NYC commuter service very similar to the Long Island Railroad (and using nearly identical rolling stock), but instead of going east from Penn Station it goes north from Grand Central Terminal over the Harlem River.
• Hersheypark is a theme park in Hershey, Pennsylvania that sells (and has several other things based on) Hershey candy.

Plants

• Blueberries are blue berries.
• And blackberries are black berries. (A bit of a subversion, since botanically they aren't berries.)

Politics

• In 1973, a Norwegian guy named Anders Lange founded a political party whose platform was based on a strong reduction of taxes, duties and public intervention. Its name? Anders Lange's Party for a Strong Reduction in Taxes, Duties and Public Intervention.
• The Anti-Masonic Party was a 19th-century American political party founded to oppose Freemasonry.
• Similarly, the Antisemitic League of France (Ligue antisémitique de France) lasted from 1889 to 1899. It was, as the name suggests, an antisemetic group in France. They had an official newspaper called L'Antijuif, which means "the Anti-Jew" - guess what they wrote about.
• Canada has a single-issue party called the Marijuana Party, who are devoted to legalizing marijuana. Now that it's legal they are pushing for limiting restrictions on marijuana.
• Jimmy Mcmillan's The Rent Is Too Damn High Party was a party whose major platform was lowering rents for tenants (mainly in New York City, but Mcmillan was not opposed to doing it in other places). Unfortunately, Mcmillan's over-the-top delivery made people think it was a joke.

Other

• In 2000 Harry Markopolos wrote a report to the SEC entitled "The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud". It was about Bernie Madoff's fund. It contained overwhelming evidence that... well, you know. The SEC still didn't get him for another 7 years.
• The Other Wiki's article on apple sauce literally starts as "Apple sauce or applesauce is a sauce made of apples". It's not wrong.
  • The Other Wiki also points out that a Beef on Weck "is made with roast beef on a kummelweck roll". Yup.
• From the "Only in Liberia" files, presenting General Butt Naked. He led a guerrilla faction that was, yes, butt naked, and led them, butt naked. How they knew he was a general without anywhere to hang his insignia, we don't know.
• When defining new classes and methods in object-oriented programming it is advisable to follow this principle so that a reader of your code can easily get an idea of what it does. This is why you'll often see classes named Something Builder, Item Factory or Drawable Thing.
• Many ITV franchises were named after the region they served, such as London Weekend Television, Yorkshire Television, Scottish Television and so on. The best example was the temporary franchise that was set up for Wales and the West of England in 1968 when TWW sold off the last few months of their contract to their successor Harlech before the latter was ready to broadcast: "Independent Television Service for Wales and the West."
• The Wehrmacht had a penchant for this. Quite possibly the best example of it is the late-war design Focke-Wulf Ta 152H Höhenjäger, which was a high-altitude interceptor. Höhenjäger literally means 'altitude hunter'. ^note In fact, the entire German language love portmanteaus and naturally runs into this a lot.
• During the World Wars, the Italian Navy had a few vehicles like that, such as the MAS (Motoscafo Armato Silurante, meanting Torpedo-Armed Motorboat) and the Siluro a Lenta Corsa (Slow-Running Torpedo. It was the first working manned torpedo, fired like a normal torpedo but much slower to allow the crew to ride it to destination and do their job).
• In the third century BCE, the Chinese invented a sword that was purpose-built to chop the horse out from underneath a cavalryman. They called it the zhanmadao, which means "horse chopping sword."
• Simplified Chinese characters were created in The '50s as a simplified version of the older Traditional Chinese characters.
• The American political pundit Matthew Yglesias invoked the trope in a January 2021 article (note: possibly paywalled) in which he specifically references the Ronseal advert to advocate that politicians run on policies that, well, do exactly what they say on the tin. That is, policies should act directly and deliver benefits directly to voters so they know it, rather than acting through weird backchannels in the tax code. (The fact that he chose this phrase, despite being an American pundit who's never seen these advertisements "in the wild", makes one highly suspicious that he has read the trope page.)
• India Pale Ale is a formulation of ale that is made with lots and lots of hops that give it a very pale appearance and was developed so that the ale could survive transport to India in sailing ships.
• On December 2020, the Phoenix Suns took over the naming rights to the then-named "PHX Arena" (which was briefly named that after their previous tenant, Talking Stick Resort, declined extending their naming rights lease) for their 2020-21 season. As such, for the entirety of that season, save for Game 5 of the 2021 NBA Finals, the team simply named their home arena... the Phoenix Suns Arena. Even after events not relating to the team occurred when the Suns weren't playing in their arena for home games.
  • This is actually quite common in sports, for instance the L.A. Dodgers play in Dodger Stadium, AT&T Stadium and Highmark Stadium were formerly (temporarily) known as Cowboys Stadium and Buffalo Bills Stadium, respectively. Speaking of which, the Triple-A baseball stadium located in downtown Buffalo went a year without sponsorship and was called... the Downtown Ballpark. Also, "(X) University Stadium/Arena" is really prevalent in college sports.
• Enforced by some business regulations that prohibit the use of trade names, particularly with law firms. Thus, you will have firms with names like "Law Office of John Smith", or "Smith, Jones & Johnson, Attorneys-at-Law".
• The US government uses the term "Unidentified flying object" to refer to flying objects that are not identified, rather than flying saucers and extraterrestrials. That is also why a typical picture of a UFO looks blurry. If the images or footage were sharper, it would be easy to identify the object and thus not classify as a UFO.

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