I Am Not Shazam / Real Life

• Many companies are so heavily associated with some of their more famous products that they are (or were) actually confused with them.
  • Until the 2000s, many people incorrectly referred to Apple Inc. as "Macintosh" or "Mac". A lot of people called Apple Stores "Mac Stores". This doesn't happen much nowadays as Apple's most prominent products are iDevices rather than Macs.
  • Alphabet Inc. was established as the parent company for Google, which is now one of several subsidiaries like Waymo and Verily, though most people still refer to the entire company as just Google.
  • Similarly, Facebook Inc. changed its name to Meta Platforms with Facebook as one of its subsidiaries, but many people still refer to the whole company as Facebook.
  • Most people refer to Amazon's smart speaker line as Amazon Alexas; though Alexa is the name of the virtual assistant technology it runs, the hardware's name is the Echo.
  • For a long time, another famous example was the Mercedes-Benz. It was manufactured by a company named Daimler until February 2022, when the company renamed itself Mercedes-Benz Group. Naturally, they don't make Daimler cars, Jaguar does: Daimler was originally a brand of Daimler-Motoren-Gesselschaft (prior to merging with Benz), but due to a contract mistake, accidentally handed the right to the name over to a licensee.
    • For a time in the 2000s, Daimler corporation was merged with Chrysler, while the rights to the Daimler name were owned by Ford.
    • Some people call the company "Mercedes" (the short name for the brand) and the cars "Benz" (i.e. a "Benz" made by "Mercedes").
  • Barbie is often referred to as a company, rather than just a product made by Mattel.
  • Many years ago, the paint manufacturer Berger ran a campaign in the UK to try to raise awareness of its own name rather than that of its various paint brands.
  • Of further note are several companies that, while they did not originally share their names with their better-known brand names, have changed their names to avoid confusion. Convenience-store chain 7-Eleven's corporate presence was known as Southland Corporation until 1999, and fast food chain Jack in the Box was incorporated under the name Foodmaker until the same year.
    • With 7-Eleven, it's a bit more complicated. To make a long story short, the company just went bankrupt and was bought out by its Japanese partner, Seven & I. Holdings.
    • In the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, a Burger King wanted to open up. As Lake Forest is a fairly wealthy suburb, Burger King approached the city under the name of the corporate owners. When the Burger King went up, the city protested as they didn't want a fast food place, but had already signed off on the restaurant.
    • Here's a particularly fun one: the UK division of Mars, the maker of the eponymous candy bar, changed their name to Masterfoods in 2001, to try to distance their non-candy brands from that of the well-known chocolate bar. Then five years later, they changed their name back to Mars because the new name wasn't as memorable.
    • The American division took the same name in 2005, but changed back at the same time as the UK division. Everyone, even the business media, just kept calling them "M&M Mars" anyways, while almost nobody knows they make Pedigree and Whiskas pet foods. Besides, Mars is a family business—wholly owned by the Mars family.
  • The Haloid Corporation changed its name to Xerox. That machine you use and the paper you get out of it are a copier and a copy, respectively, not a xerox. It was not originally correct to use 'xerox' as a verb to mean the act of copying, but it had become quite common.
  • Binney & Smith changed its name to Crayola LLC in 2007 due to the company continually being referred to as "Crayola".
  • An episode of Jeopardy! asked which company made the Bold 9000 smartphone. The correct company was not "BlackBerry" as they said it was, but rather Canadian firm "Research in Motion".^note And their former recruiting website domain was rim.jobs The company later renamed themselves to "BlackBerry" on January 30, 2013.
  • Sun Microsystems Inc. switched its Nasdaq stock symbol from SUNW to JAVA in 2007, after its popular programming language. Sun originally started out selling only hardware. The company merged with Oracle Corp. in 2010.
  • Software makers regularly do this. "Avast Software", maker of the popular antivirus program, was once called "Alwil Software". "Diskeeper Corporation" started out as "Executive Software".
  • The owner of Target stores was called the Dayton Hudson Corporation (and before that the Dayton Dry Goods Company) until August 2000, when it was renamed the Target Corporation.
  • Not even products are safe from this. In several cases, people tend to use the trademarked name of a well-known product as a catch-all name for the same product made by other companies. For example, no matter who makes the petroleum jelly, people will likely call it "Vaseline". The same goes for adhesive bandages, which are almost exclusively called "Band-Aids".^note In North America. In the UK, they are generally called "plasters". And that generic box of toasted whole grain oat cereal that looks like Cheerios, but definitely isn't called that? Doesn't matter. They're still Cheerios! The term is referred to as a generic trademark.
  • Once upon a time, Pentax cameras (named for the roof pentaprism viewfinder they used) were produced and sold by Asahi Optical Company, Ltd, as one of several lines of cameras the company sold. They proved so popular that the company renamed themselves Pentax. Additionally, the cameras' popularity caused the lens mount they used, the M42 lens mount, to be known as the "Pentax Screwmount" in the US. Similarly, the same lens mount was known in Japan as the "Praktika thread mount", after a brand of East German cameras that used them. The lens mount in question was actually designed and first used by VEB Zeiss Ikon^note based at the time in Soviet-occupied Germany, before they changed their name to Pentacon under pressure from Zeiss Ikon, a similarly-named firm in the US Zone of Occupied Germany. Germany copyrights were presumably a complicated issue in the Cold War years. for the Contax S, the first camera to use the roof pentaprism viewfinders that Pentax would take its name from.
  • The company that brews Fat Tire isn't called "The Fat Tire Brewing Company", it's "The New Belgium Brewing Company". The company actually makes several beers that don't even have "Fat Tire" in the name, but New Belgium Fat Tire is the only one of their beers that most people have heard of.
  • In 2016, Fuji Heavy Industries joined the club of companies changing their name to that of their flagship consumer product, becoming Subaru Corporation.
  • The developers of AVG were known as Grisoft until they changed their name to AVG Technologies in 2008.
• There was never a party in Russia called the Bolshevik Party. The party was called the Social Democratic Labour Party, and contained two factions, nicknamed Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (Russian for 'majority' and 'minority' respectively). These names reflect neither the composition of the party (normally the two groups were of roughly equal size) nor the respective factions' political opinions (if anything the opposite - the Mensheviks favoured a mass movement, while the Bolsheviks preferred a small movement of professional revolutionaries). The names came from the origin of the split, which had been a vote on party membership policy which the Bolsheviks narrowly won.
  • Speaking of Russia under the Bolsheviks, it's common for English speakers to colloquially call the Soviet Union "Russia". The official name of the country that existed from 1922 to 1991 was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the Soviet Union for short. Russia (officially the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, or RSFSR) was by far the largest of the Soviet Union's constituent republics and became one of the 15 independent states created by the breakup of the Union in 1991.
• The name of the first emperor of the Roman Empire is generally given as "Augustus". That's actually a title — and indeed, one granted to virtually all Roman Emperors.
  • Prior to his accession as Emperor in 27 BCE, historians generally refer to Augustus as 'Octavian'. No one called him this at the time — his legal name, and the one he was actually known as, was 'Gaius Julius Caesar'. 'Octavianus' was a rarely-used fourth name only really used to distinguish him from his namesake uncle and adoptive father.
  • Rome's third Emperor is generally known today as Caligula, but at the time he was known simply as Gaius. (Caligula was a childhood nickname that meant something like "Little Boots".)
  • The title 'Emperor' itself comes from the Latin Imperator. While it was consistently one of the head of state's titles, it simply means "commander" and was never considered their defining or most important title. The more important titles were considered to be Princeps ('first citizen') in the early Imperial period, Dominus ('master') in the late imperial period and Augustus throughout. The later Byzantine Emperors generally used Basileus.
  • The name of Julius Caesar's great rival, Pompey, is generally given as Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. As virtually all prominent Romans had three names, it is often assumed that this was his name. In fact, his name was just Gnaeus Pompeius — Pompey was from humble origins and, unlike most highborn Romans, had no third name. 'Magnus' simply meant 'the Great'.
    • A similar phenomenon occurs with Charlemagne, whose actual name was simply Charles (or 'Karl', or 'Carolus' if you want to go Latinate about it). 'Charlemagne' means 'Charles the Great'.
• The Committee of Public Safety's rule over France between 1793 and 1794 is generally referred to as 'The Reign of Terror'. Most people assume this was the name given to it by terrified ordinary people who were at risk of being executed. Actually it was the name the government themselves gave to their policies, and the people who they were supposed to be terrorising were not ordinary French people, but the foreign armies fighting against France.
• Strictly speaking, Big Ben is the name of the bell that strikes the hour in the Elizabeth Tower^*Renamed from the "Clock Tower" in 2012, partly to honour Queen Useful Notes/ElizabethⅡ’s sixtieth year on the throne and partly to put an end to the confusion over what the tower is called., rather than the clock itself, or its clock tower.
  • Double example here, since most people who know the tower isn't called Big Ben persist in correcting people who get it wrong by informing them it's actually called St. Stephen's Tower. It isn't. St Stephen's Tower is a small tower at the main entrance to the Palace of Westminster (called St. Stephen's Entrance), but the error is so widespread, most tourist information websites still get it wrong. The tower which contains Big Ben was simply called the Clock Tower. As of the Diamond Jubilee, said tower shall be called "Elizabeth Tower" after Queen Elizabeth II.
  • David Mitchell on The Unbelievable Truth: "You're standing at the bottom of Big Ben—you know what I mean by Big Ben and everyone will write in and say it's not called Big Ben, the tower with the clock in that makes the bongy noise!"
• The founder of "Wendy's" was Dave Thomas. "Wendy" refers to his daughter^note (extra example here in that her name is actually Melinda; Wendy is her nickname), who was mentioned often in commercials by Thomas, but didn't actually start appearing in the commercials until 2011 — at about the same time as a cute red-headed twenty-something in braids also started to appear as "Wendy"^note yet another example here in that the character's actual name is "Red", not Wendy in other commercials. Then there is the cartoon Wendy: the Pippi Longstocking type who appears on the logo, and eventually became an animated mascot much like Ronald McDonald. Very confusing.
  • Same with Mercedes, which was called that after the daughter of one of the employees of Daimler-Benz.
• Carl's Jr., to some extent. Its founder's name was Carl Karcher, but his dad's name was Leo. Karcher initially opened a restaurant called Carl's Drive-In Barbecue, then a smaller version that he called Carl's Jr. The latter ended up becoming the More Popular Spin-Off.
• While there is a town of that name in the Zone of Alienation, Chernobyl refers to the district in which the nuclear disaster took place. The power plant is located in Pripyat, 15 km from the town of Chernobyl.
  • Incidentally, the official name of the power plant wasn't Chernobyl, it was the Vladimir I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station.
  • Additionally, Chernobyl became the version of the town's name that was widely known because it is the Russian name. But Russian is not widely spoken in that area of Ukraine, and the local Ukrainian name used by virtually all locals is the slightly different Chornobyl.
• Not many people know that Paul Frank's famous monkey character is actually called Julius. Others actually think he shares his creator's name.
• "Christ" wasn't the last name of Jesus. It's the Greek-derived word for "anointed" (how you show someone is a king, prophet or both), the Aramaic/Hebrew-sourced version being, of course "Messiah". He likely didn't have one—most people at the time either didn't need one, or if they did it wasn't fixed: he'd just be "Jesus the Carpenter", "Jesus of Nazareth" or "Jesus the Preacher", depending on the circumstances. If he had one, his full name would probably have been, in Hebrew, "Jesus, Son of Joseph".
  • To help illustrate this, many times in Paul's letters, he refers to "Christ Jesus", which is not a typo.
  • Similarly, "Santa" is not Santa Claus's first name but rather a nickname. His name is, of course, Nicholas (St. Nicholas) and the term "Santa Claus" comes from the Dutch term Sinterklaas, which means "St. Nicholas" in Dutch. The British name for him, "Father Christmas" started out as a separate character who was invented to represent yuletide merriment and feasting, but was merged into the Santa Claus character in the twentieth century.
  • While there is not a scholarly consensus on what exactly it does mean, "Iscariot" was not Judas' surname. The most popular theory is that it means "from Kerioth", but it is certainly a descriptive term, not a name.
  • The name of the man who became known as St. Peter, referred to in the Bible as 'Peter' and sometimes 'Simon Peter' was Shimon, anglicised as Simon. 'Peter' was a nickname given to him by Jesus meaning 'rock'. When Jesus addresses him by name, he calls him Simon.
• The authors of many older Jewish theological books, such as Ḥazon Ish or Ben Ish Ḥai, are commonly referred to by the name of their works, even though their real names are known. This is roughly equivalent to knowing Herman Melville as "Moby Dick".
• "Genghis Khan" is a title ^note  likely meaning something like "Universal Ruler", not a name. His real name was Temüjin.
• In United States space travel, Apollo refers to the name of the program, not the rocket (either Saturn IB or Saturn V, depending on the mission), or the spacecraft itself (after the first two missions, each Command Module and Lunar Module had its own name).
• Kimberley-Clark is known as "the Kleenex company" despite having several other very successful products like Huggies diapers and Cottonelle toilet paper.
• A Cockney is traditionally born within the sound of Bow Bells. Many people, even a lot of Londoners if they were honest, think this refers to the district of Bow deep in the old East End. In fact Bow Bells refers to the church of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside, right in the heart of the financial district. Given the amount of traffic and building work in the area one would have to be born on the pavement outside to be within earshot. One American guide book had a good stab at the truth, insisting that Bow Bells were not in fact in Bow but in Aldgate. At least it was partly right.
• The University of Wisconsin actually refers to thirteen campuses in cities scattered all across the state. The school that most know as "Wisconsin" and whose athletic teams play in the Big Ten is actually the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
  • This tends to cause frustration for students and alumni from the other UW schools such as UW-Stevens Point (UWSP) or UW-Whitewater (UWW) when applying for jobs out of state who often end having to explain the naming convention. This is particularly a problem for UW-Milwaukee which also shares the UWM initials with Madison (although the Madison campus is usually referred to only as UW with no qualifiers). This has led some to casually refer to the university as "University of Milwaukee" in the hope of avoiding confusion. The UWM athletic program has itself simply "Milwaukee" throughout the current century, and two other UW campuses, Green Bay and Parkside, have since changed their athletic brands to their geographic identifiers.
  • The State University of New York (SUNY) system is similar. Particularly irritating is confusion between the State University of New York at Buffalo (usually shortened to University at Buffalo) and the State University of New York College at Buffalo (better known as Buffalo State College). But few people would say that they graduated from SUNY, only that they graduated from a SUNY school.
  • Same for Indiana and its IU and Purdue systems. The one in Bloomington is the one that gets to use just IU, and the one in West Lafayette is the one that gets to use just Purdue.
• During the Second World War, American soldiers came across railroad stations with a large sign stating simply, "HALT", and mistook this for the name of the town. In reality, "halt" in German means "stop", and the signs were put there so that people would not attempt to trespass^note It also means "stop" in English, so how the soldiers made this mistake is unknown—theories range from it either being a tongue-in-cheek joke taken too far, to the warning placards themselves bearing an uncanny resemblance to some American road signs used to label city limits.. By the end of the war, there were several instances of towns named Halt across the country.
• And then there's the story of Ireland's worst driver, the mysterious Polish serial-speedster and parking offender Mr. Prawo Jazdy. The Irish police stopped and fined him on numerous occasions, but he constantly managed to evade justice by giving the police a different address every time. Eventually, after more than 50 incidents involving the elusive Prawo Jazdy, someone in the police-force asked their colleagues a somewhat embarrassing question: What is the Polish word for "Driver's License"?
• In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo paper and the #JeSuisCharlie campaign that followed it, many had a misconception that Charlie Hebdo is the name of one of the victims, or the editor of the paper. There is no person named as such, "Hebdo" is simply short for the French word "hebdomadaire" meaning "weekly", and the "Charlie" comes from an older comics magazine created by the original publishers, which was sort of a double reference to both Charlie Brown of Peanuts and then French President Charles de Gaulle.
• An interesting example is "Ruby Ridge", what the site of the famous 1992 standoff in Idaho between Randy Weaver and federal agents is commonly referred to; most believe it refers to a town or site named Ruby Ridge. In fact no place was ever referred to as such prior to the incident. The incident occurred at a previously unnamed location that sat between Ruby Creek and Caribou Ridge. "Ruby Ridge" was a media-coined portmanteau that eventually caught on.
• Jokingly invoked by Norm Macdonald in one of his appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He talks about having a stimulating conversation with a complete stranger who he met on a recent airplane flight, and learning several interesting facts along the way. One fact was that the spaceship from Star Trek was actually called "The Enterprise"; before that, he had always assumed that it was called "The Star Trek."
• The famous Italian organized crime group is called Cosa Nostra (which depending on who you ask either means "This Thing of Ours" or "Our Thing and Our Family"), not the Mafia.
• There is technically no amusement park called "Coney Island" in Brooklyn, New York. Coney Park is a neighborhood, not a park. The amusement parks are Luna Park and Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park. There are also a few rides unaffiliated with any park. The beach and boardwalk are not related to any park. Still, when people talk about "going to Coney Island", they are referring to the amusement parks, beach, and everything on the boardwalk as a whole.
• The proposed Strategic Defense Initiative ICBM defense project was often referred to as the Star Wars defense project. The public naturally assumed it was a Shout-Out due to the projects proposed use of lasers and particle beams. However, this nickname was never employed by the government agencies or in any of their research proposals. It has its origin not as a Fanboy homage but an insult from a senator who was clearly opposed to the idea. ^note Ted Kennedy being the senator in question. President Reagan didn't get the memo on that and unwisely made references to Star Wars in his speeches supporting the proposal. This undoubtedly led to the pop cultural osmosis of the general public doing the same. Reportedly, George Lucas is understandably still not amused.
• "North Africa" is the name of the northern geographical region of the African continent. While there is obviously a country named "South Africa", there isn't one named "North Africa".
  • On the other hand, "South Africa" refers only to the country, not to the entire southern geographical region of Africa, which should only be called "Southern Africa" to avoid confusion.
• Many people colloquially refer to actor Paul Reubens as Pee Wee Herman, not realizing it's simply the name of a character he plays in various media and is not a name he's ever gone by either professionally or personally.
• Similarly, many colloquially referred to Bob Einstein as Super Dave Osborne, also not realizing it was just the name of the character he played in multiple media.
• The famous cathedral in Paris is not named "Notre Dame", as people often think. Its real name is "Notre-Dame de Paris", meaning "Our Lady of Paris". "Notre Dame" just means "Our Lady", which in this case is a title for the Virgin Mary, who is the person the cathedral is dedicated to, not the cathedral itself.
• Speaking of Notre Dame, the full name of the university in Indiana, most notable for its football team, is the "University of Notre Dame du Lac", meaning "Our Lady of the Lake". Which brings up another example of this trope. The campus includes two small lakes. However, the Catholic order that founded the university took possession of the site in winter. It's believed that the snow and the marshy land in the area gave the appearance of a single lake to the priest who founded the university, hence the name of "du Lac" (the lake) instead of "des Lacs" (the lakes).
• The festive season at the beginning of the year in New Orleans is Carnival. Mardi Gras only refers to the last day.
• Many people think of "Disney World" as the theme park with the castle; when Disney's EPCOT first opened in 1982, you might have heard someone say "First we went to Disney World, then the next day we hit EPCOT." But Disney World, or more officially the "Walt Disney World Resort", is actually the collective name for all the Orlando-area attractions. The park with the Haunted Mansion, Space Mountain, etc. is the "Magic Kingdom".
• This is sort of how the state of Texas got its name. It's an Anglicisation of the Spanish name "Tejas", which itself is derived from the Caddo word táyshaʼ, meaning friend. The Spanish colonisers referred to the Caddo people living there as "Tejas", as in "friends", and referred to the land as "provincia de los Tejas" or "provincia de Texas". Over time, people mistook this to mean "province of Texas", and the state acquired its final name.
• Similarly Canada's name came from the Iroquoian word "kanata", which basically means "village". When early explorer Jacques Cartier asked natives along the St. Lawrence River where they were from, they responded "kanata", causing him to believe this was the name of the entire region, which was anglicized as "Canada". This name then spread to cover the entire territory of modern day Canada and was the adopted as the country's name.
• It's a common mistake by people from outside the UK to refer to the biggest island in the British Isles as "England". In fact, the island is called Great Britain, and England is just one of the countries that make up Great Britain, the other two being Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, is also not synonymous with England, as it is sometimes incorrectly used — it's the collective name for a group of four countries, those being England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which itself is one of two countries on the separate island of Ireland, the other being an independent country officially called "Ireland", though often referred to as the Republic of Ireland (especially when distinguishing from the North).
• Technically, America (or "The Americas") is the name for the landmass as a whole, which comprises the continents of North America and South America. The country people often refer to as simply "America" is officially the United States of America, or USA.
• There is no one country named Korea. There are two separate countries, officially named the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea, though more often colloquially referred to as North Korea and South Korea respectively. North Korea and South Korea never refer to themselves by those names, as each government considers itself the sole legitimate government of the Korean Peninsula.
• June 20 or 21 and December 21 or 22 are often known as the summer and winter solstices, respectively, when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted the closest or furthest from the sun. Meanwhile, March 20 and September 22 or 23 are the spring and fall equinoxes, respectively, when the Earth is titled the least. ^note (All of these seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere.) Solstices and equinoxes specifically refer to the brief moment when the Earth is most or least tilted, not the entire day.
• Olympus Mons is the name of Mars's largest volcano, not the name of the red spot on Jupiter, which is simply known as the "Great Red Spot". The Great Red Spot isn't a volcano as Jupiter is a gas planet; it's a storm that has raged on the planet for centuries.

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