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A series title that made perfect sense when it began, but after a number of changes to the premise, no longer makes sense to people who don't go back to the beginning. Sometimes a new element is put in to justify the title.
This usually happens when a movie named after a specific MacGuffin suddenly gets a sequel, and changing the title to something else might throw people off that this is a sequel. One of the ways to avert this is through a title Retcon, downgrading the original to a subtitle with the main title being something more consistent. They very well couldn't have called the Indiana Jones sequel Raiders of the Lost Ark 2, could they?
See also The Artifact. Often a direct result of Nothing Is the Same Anymore. Sometimes results in New Season, New Name. Happens often in poorly devised Alternate Universe Fan Fiction. Eventually this could turn a title into a Nonindicative Name. This can also happen on a larger scale with Network Decay.
Not to be confused with MacGuffin Title.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha — The "Lyrical" part was part of an incantation Nanoha used to activate her spells. By around the third episode of the first season, only one of her spells requires the incantation at all. It sticks around a little longer as On The Next Episode Of Catch Phrase, though even then it wasn't applied to the darker episodes. She then drops the practice altogether around the start of the second season.
- About the time of Nanoha StrikerS, the series dropped any pretense of being a Magical Girl show, but that part of the title wasn't replaced until Nanoha Force.
- And Nanoha is only a secondary character in both Vivid and the above-mentioned Force, but her name is still on the title.
- And now that Magic itself is becoming So Last Season in Force, the only appropriate words left in the title of that series is "Force" and "Record"!
- In Dragon Ball, while the title plot coupons are the driving force of the first series, as time goes on, the show becomes less about the aforementioned Dragon Balls and more about watching long-winded bouts between various superhuman beings. By Dragon Ball Z, the balls are relegated to little more than a plot device the protagonists customarily fall back on when too many of their own die. This comes full circle in the follow-up anime series Dragon Ball GT, where the Dragon Balls are the central focus again.
- This is even lampshaded after all the Dragon Balls have been gathered the first time, Shenron made his appearance and the Balls were lost again.
- A version appears in Fist of the North Star, although it's not the title of the series. Kenshiro's signature attack is the "Hundred Crack Fist of the North Star". But why "Hundred Crack?" Because in its first published appearance in a non-canonical prequel pilot, the move's entire purpose was to crack an enemy's hardened armor in a hundred places. Thus, it is the "hundred crack" fist. However, it was never used for this purpose in the main series, instead just making enemies explode like everybody else.
- In the first chapter of Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip Alpha does indeed taking a shopping trip to Yokohama—which has no actual relevance to the rest of the series until the very last chapter, when she goes shopping again.
- Only the first few chapters of High School Of The Dead are set in a High School. This is, however, mostly the result of a translation issue. A more accurate translation of the title is "Academy Apocalypse", which makes slightly more sense.
- When Meine Liebe (German for "My love") went from Dating Sim to anime they removed the female lead which leads to people mistaking it for a Boys Love series.
- Index, the title character of To Aru Majutsu no Index, gets Demoted to Extra within the first ten episodes. Albeit the occasional arc gives her more focus, but she never regains her importance of the first arc. She is, however, one of the most important characters of the series, so it's not as bad as other examples.
- The anime Candy Boy was originally released as an extra for a single of the same name. This is rather confusing to new viewers, as all of the characters are female.
- Elfen Lied is named after a German song of the same name, which was featured throughout the manga. The anime, however, dropped the song and left the name.
- Elfen Lied specifically translates as "Elven Song".
- Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds was about five Signer Dragons... until Crow's Black-Winged Dragon came along.
- The "Yu-Gi-Oh!" itself is an artifact; it means King of Games, and is the title because its main character (or rather, the main character's alter-ego) is invincible in any game. After Duel Monsters became the only game anyone played (from volume 8 of the manga on), the title started to make less sense. And the titular "King of Games" isn't even present in the various spinoffs, having moved on to the afterlife at the end of the original series.
- The Shadow RPG, Four Aces, and Dungeons Dragons & Dice weren't Duel Monsters. So one can say it only applies to the anime and its spin-offs. Granted, DDD showed up as DDM (Dungeon Dice Monsters) in the anime and so did the Shadow RPG, but in the anime they rewrote the DDD arc with Duel Monsters in mind and the tabletop aspect of the Shadow RPG was radically nerfed in favor of additional card battles and other anime-related changes.
- Axis Powers Hetalia is beginning to lean this way, with very little of the new material focusing on WWII or even on Italy. This may be part of the reason the anime was renamed to Hetalia: World Series and later Hetalia: It's a Beautiful World, although the "World 8" are still used as "main characters" in anime marketing.
- Saint Seiya got that title because Seiya was The Protagonist but new sagas don't even have him as a character, as they revolve around different Athena's saints, sometimes a century apart.
- Guru Guru Pon Chan. The "Guru Guru" in the title refers to spinning, and only in volume 1 did Ponta spin to transform.
- The anime adaption of the Haruhi Suzumiya light novels, gets its title from the first novel, The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya, however, the show adapts from 5 different books, each one with a different title. Currently it has adapted the first three books plus some short stories of the fifth and sixth novels.
- Averted by The Movie based on the fourth novel, since it's named after the book.
- Marmalade Boy got this twice: The original title referred to The Protagonist as that would be a guy before the author decided to do a Gender Flip and got a female protagonist instead, though the manga subverts this by having said protagonist nickname her Love Interest after marmalade in a Title Drop. Furthermore, in Spain the anime was renamed "La Familia Crece", which means "The Family Grows" and refers to the first episode setting up the two families living together, though this isn't given a lot of attention during most of the show. There's even barely any Flirty Stepsiblings angst or the like.
- Medaka Box: The titular box plays less and less of a role as the series goes on. Initially, its role made sense as the series revolved around helping others with their day-to-day problems. Now, it's only occasionally used as a plot device.
- The Eponymous death game in Sword Art Online and that struggle to clear it are only the first story arc of the series.
- Pandora Hearts takes its title from author Mochizuki Jun's debut oneshot, where a "Pandora" is a box that resides in the chest of anyone who contracts with an "abyss." In the series proper, the box is replaced with the incuse that appears on the chests of illegal contractors, "abysses" are now known as "chains," the Abyss is the name of the Eldritch Location where chains are born, and Pandora is the name of the organization that researches the Abyss.
- Deadman Wonderland is the name of both the series and its setting, a privately funded prison where the inmates compete in a televised Blood Sport. At the end of the manga's first arc, there's a mass breakout and the prison is leveled in the chaos — the characters, to a man, leave Deadman Wonderland, forever. The anime was canceled just before it got to showing anything post-breakout, which is handy because there's little point in the title Deadman Wonderland if Deadman Wonderland isn't even standing anymore.
Art
- Modernism isn't very modern any more. Postmodernism is also pretty old. The "Modern Breakthrough" is even older.
Comic Books
- The very term "comic book". Unless you think Batman is hilarious. Which he is
 , but still....
- The 'DC' in DC Comics originally stood for Detective Comics. Very few of their comics today feature actual detectives, and officially the acronym no longer has any meaning.note If it did, the company's name would be "Detective Comics Comics." Similarly, while the actual Detective Comics publication does feature Batman, "the world's greatest detective", many of the stories therein feature little or no actual detective work.
- This means that if you buy an issue of Detective, you are in fact buying an issue of Detective Comics Comics' Detective Comics.
- Similarly, Action Comics was intended to be an anthology title of, well, action comics. The debut of Superman in the first issue and his subsequent popularity led to the character taking over the line.
- While Cable And Deadpool always had the tendency to focus more on the latter than the former, the title became obsolete once Cable (temporarily) died. They lampshaded this by crossing out the word "Cable" on the covers and replacing it with the name of the guest stars.
- From #3 onwards of the comic series Nextwave, its official title was "Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E" (due to trademark issues). This was despite the fact they stopped being agents of H.A.T.E by the end of #1, giving it an Artifact Title from the beginning. This was lampshaded in every comics recap after it became irrelevant.
- The "Stories" in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories were originally passages of text with minimal illustrations (and thus, "stories" about Disney characters) rather than actual comic strips. As those faded out of use in favour for comics, the official title of the series remained Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, but the title logo simply reads Walt Disney's Comics.
- When Donald Duck's superhero alter-ego from the Italian comics, originally known as Paperinik, made its way into American comics in Disney Adventures, the characters was given the English name of the Duck Avenger, the obvious reason for the change being so that he'd have the same initials as the magazine. Nine years later, the Duck Avenger is still the character's official English name, even though Disney Adventures is no longer published.
- In Vol. 4 of Mirage's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, the turtles are now in their thirties, having aged in real time since the original series.
- 2000AD's title was chosen in 1977 because it sounded futuristic. Publishers IPC Media didn't really think about this trope when they okayed it. They launched new titles on a regular basis, and the predicted lifespan of a children's title (as it was originally) was 18 months. In the 1990s there were a few attempts to change the name to something less "dated", all of which were roundly rejected by the fans. It's still called 2000 AD today. It's now more of a Badass Boast since the stance in Prog 2000 (the last issue released in 1999)note Since 1999, the prog that covers the Christmas / New Year period used the new year as the issue number, as of mid-late 2012 the regular weekly issues are "only" up to the early 1800s said "We were here first. The year can change its name."
- Watchmen character the Comedian is an In-Universe example. The "jester" motif of his original costume fit his name. But by the Vietnam era, he wore leather armor with a red-white-and-blue motif. In his later years, he's about as funny as a hammer to the face. The name still makes sense metaphorically, though: the Comedian is the only one who "gets the joke" about the messed-up, senseless Crapsack World the story takes place in.
- It's implied in the movie at least that he chose the name BECAUSE he was a nihilistic Deadpan Snarker sociopath. Devoid of empathy, and able to laugh at what everyone else endures in the Crapsack World. We're certainly never shown a cheerful Comedian, even in the flashbacks.
- None of the main characters in Knights of the Old Republic are the titular (Jedi) Knights: Zayne is a Padawan who missed his first opportunity due to a combination of circumstances and later refused the offer of knighthood after clearing his name, and his companions never had any formal Jedi training (and most of them aren't even Force-sensitive). The comic inherited that title from the video game, which in turn got it from an even earlier arc of the Tales of the Jedi limited comic series.
- When Jack Kirby and Joe Simon created the Newsboy Legion in The Golden Age of Comic Books, they were so-called because they were orphans who sold newspapers to earn a living. This had become an anachronism in later years, which was addressed in several different ways:
- When Kirby introduced their identical sons in the Bronze Age, they were also known as the Newsboy Legion, even though they'd never sold a paper in their lives.
- The current incarnation of the Legion are clones of the originals (the sons don't exist Post Crisis), and they still don't sell papers.
- Walter Simonson tried to bring them up-to-date in Orion as the Newsgroup Legion, a term more recently used by Jimmy Olsen (although it remains to be seen if he's talking about the same kids).
- In Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers, the Newsboy Legion is the Manhattan Guardian's army of amateur reporters.
- The home titles of DC Comics' Enemy Ace feature were Our Army At War and Star-Spangled War Stories. For the mostly-American readership, the tales of German World War One ace Hans von Hammer were neither "star-spangled" nor about "our" army.
- Stephanie Brown, Batgirl 2009, originally operated under the superhero identity of 'the Spoiler.' Her name and modus operandi came from her relationship with her father, the Cluemaster, who was a B-grade Riddler knockoff. Stephanie grew to despise her father and his criminal ways, so she would go out and leave clues to help Batman and Robin catch him, spoiling his crimes. However, Stephanie quickly branched out into crimefighting beyond her father and she no longer did any "spoiling", she would directly intervene and fight crime herself. She retained the name for years, not counting her brief tenure as the fourth Robin, and there became such a disconnect between her current activities and her original actions that even a lot of her fans did not know where her identity came from. In 2009, following the death of Batman, she inherited the Batgirl title from Cassandra Cain and the Spoiler identity was laid to rest.
- DC Comics' World's Finest title has traditionally been a Superman-Batman teamup book. It evolved out of a 1940s World's Fair special comic.
- The Marvel Comics line 2099 showcased the future of the Marvel Universe, including future versions of classic heroes. Initially, the comics took place in the year 2099. Instead of straining the confines of Comic Book Time, Marvel allowed the titles to mention months and years going by, thus the titles eventually took place in the year 2100 and beyond.
- The title of the graphic novel series 30 Days of Night refers to the period during the winter in Barrow, Alaska during which the sun doesn't rise for 30 days straight. In the series, a legion of vampires takes advantage of this to go on a 30 day feeding frenzy without worrying about the sun. The series went on to take place in locations other than Alaska, but retained the title. The events in Barrow set most of the rest of the series in continuous motion by making vampires in danger of being exposed because of the huge massacre in Barrow. So it's partially justified in that the events in the first installment remain important as the series goes on.
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen retains its title up until the very end, even though the eponymous League was officially disbanded sometime between the events of Century: 1910 and The Black Dossier. By the end, the main cast has ceased to be a "league" and become a dwindling "trio".
- In a more general sense, the title of the series was originally supposed to reflect its Victorian setting, since it's the kind of name that a superhero team would have chosen for itself in the late 19th century. Said Victorian setting has been out the window since The Black Dossier (which took place in The Fifties), with the last two installments taking place in The Sixties and the 2000s, respectively. The name simply remained the same because, in-universe, there was no actual reason to change it.
- Superman is the last son of Krypton. Except for Supergirl. And General Zod. And the city of Kandor. And KryptoTheSuperdog...
Fan Fiction (General)
- Fanfiction gets this a lot, as many works are named after an element of the premise that isn't necessarily required for there to be a story set in that universe, or in a different universe with similar characters.
- Digimon fanfiction tends to have this problem (i.e lots of the human characters, no Digimon and if you get the Digimon, there's a decent chance there won't be any villains to battle). This is because Digimon has a LOT of fanfiction, and fanfiction is primarily a medium for the writers' romantic fantasies. Those selfsame fans complained when Frontier didn't have any Digimon partners and instead focused on the human team dynamics.
- A lot of Pokémon fanfics either don't include Pokemon or barely mention them.
- A lot of Harry Potter fanfiction features no appearance by the title character at all. In fact, there is a whole genre of fics dedicated to the era when Harry's parents attended Hogwarts. There's also plenty of fics about the early days of Hogwarts, taking place long before any of the characters from the books (except a few of the ghosts) were even born.
- Likewise, a large percentage of Fullmetal Alchemist fanfiction does not actually include Edward Elric, the titular Fullmetal Alchemist.
- And by definition, any fanfiction taking place after the manga's ending doesn't include the Fullmetal Alchemist, because Ed is no longer an alchemist.
- For that matter, the same logic also applies to the 2003 anime's movie Conqueror of Shamballa.
- The Land Before Time features many fanfics involving time travel to the future... so... not set in the land before time then...
- Most popular Rave Master fanfiction contains no reference to the rave stones at all. The biggest ones, in fact, are the ones where the characters are set in a normal universe with no magic or swordfighting of any sort.
Fan Fiction (Specific)
- Calvin And Hobbes The Series has "The Transmitter Conspiracy", which reveals the so-called "conspiracy" behind the transmitter, then proceeds to go into a plot that, while still based around the transmitter, doesn't really have to do with the conspiracy.
Film
- B-movie action/martial arts movie series Best Of The Best. The first one involves crowning a champion of a martial arts tournament, hints the title. The sequel is a revenge blood-sport style movie, but the title can sort of still be justified. The third and fourth movies have nothing what so ever to do with martial arts competition: the third movie involves white supremacists trying to take over a small town, and the fourth one involved the Russian Mafia and counterfeit cash.
- Only about half the Friday the 13th films are actually set on Friday the 13th.
- The titular diamond in The Pink Panther is only referred to in a few films of the series, leading many people to think that "the Pink Panther" is Inspector Clouseau's nickname. Averted by the second film in the series, however, A Shot in the Dark, named such because it includes Clouseau but not the diamond.
- The first Free Willy movie ends with Willy being set free, hence the title. There isn't a whole lot of freeing in the sequels. Unless the "free" there is supposed to be an adjective describing Willy. This was originally supposed to be averted, as the second film was going to be titled Willy 2: The Adventure Home (early trailers carry this title). It seems as if Warner Bros. got cold feet and became afraid that people wouldn't make the connection to Free Willy.
- Home Alone. The first film fits this title perfectly. In the second film, Kevin isn't even at home, but he is alone. In the third film, Alex is at home, but isn't alone all that much as his mother is often at home as well. In the fourth film, Kevin is neither at home nor alone; he's at his future stepmother's house, which is always also occupied by the butler.
- The Thin Man. The original film's title referred to the murder victim in the story. However, the sequels continued to use 'Thin Man' in the title, leading people to assume that 'The Thin Man' was the lead detective Nick Charles. By the time of the fifth film in the series, The Thin Man Goes Home, in which Nick and Nora go back to Nick's hometown, this was true.
- Jurassic Park. The titular park only merits a mention or two outside the first film. The Jurassic Park was pushed to the back of the title for The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
- When Neil Diamond did his remake of The Jazz Singer, he retained the original title, although he sings no jazz in the movie.
- Final Destination, sort of. While the title also refers to the character's fated deaths, for the first movie it was a play on the fact that the characters' escaping a plane crash set off the events. Later movies have nothing to do with planes and the double meaning is lost.
- More an Artifact Naming Convention, the Carry On series began with Carry On Sergeant, a command familiar to all ex-servicemen or national servicemen at the time. It was commonly used by British officers, indicating that the sergeant addressed should proceed with orders given, or resume what they were doing before they were interrupted. Only a few of the subsequent titles came close to following that context.
- Major League: Back to the Minors. Oh, there are major league ballplayers in the movie — the Minnesota Twins are the Opposing Sports Team, playing their own AAA affiliate in an exhibition match.
- An interesting cross-language translation example happened with the Steven Seagal movie Under Siege. In Israel, the copywriters decided to translate the title as "Naval Siege", which sounded cooler in Hebrew. It also fit the movie well, because it takes place on a ship. However, when the sequel Under Siege 2 Dark Territory came out, they had a problem: the movie doesn't have a single ship in it. The result? The first movie is called "Naval Siege", while the second movie is called "Under Siege". Let the confusion commence!
- The Madagascar sequel goes the subtitle route by adding Escape 2 Africa. The third film has them going to Europe.
- The reason the book is titled The Neverending Story is left out of the film version. In the book, many vague allusions are made to the further adventures of secondary characters, always accompanied by the phrase, "But that is another story, and will be told another time." In the end, Bastian is told he can't leave until every storyline he started up is finished. However, several story hooks get created for every plot he wrapped up. Atreyu saves him by taking on the task on his behalf. In other words, the book has a very good reason why the story is neverending: because the act of writing a story creates a world where further adventures could happen, and telling those stories only creates openings for new ones. The human imagination has a limitless capacity for new stories. You couldn't actually film that, anyway.
- Troll 2 is about goblins. It has nothing to do with a troll or the original Troll.
- When asked, the director said, essentially, that trolls and goblins were the same thing.
- The Karate Kid (2010) remake does not feature any karate, and when the primary character's mother talks about him learning Karate he explicitly states that it is Kung Fu, not Karate. Press releases have explained that the other characters gave him the derogatory nickname 'karate kid' because he claimed to know a little bit of karate early in the film, but he was never addressed as such in the movie itself. The film was released as The Kung-Fu Kid in several countries. In South Korea, it was called The Best Kid.
- The remake of The Manchurian Candidate doesn't have anything to do with Manchuria. The writers justify the name by involving a corporation called "Manchurian Global" in the plot.
- First Blood refers to how John Rambo justified maiming several American policemen: "They drew first blood, not me." In the second movie, Rambo: First Blood Part 2, the cops are completely out of the picture, and there's no mention by anyone of who struck the first blow. Further movies dropped "First Blood" from the title (Rambo III and Rambo).
- Die Hard in Poland and Italy has this. The title there is Glass Trap (Szklana Pułapka and Trappola di cristallo, respectively), which makes sense, since the first one takes place in a skyscraper. Not so much in the sequels. The same happens in Spain. The title there is Crystal Jungle (Jungla de Cristal). Latin-America was relieved of the problem, as the movie there was called Duro de matar (Hard to kill).
- A Nightmare On Elm Street eventually left Elm Street.
- Zig-zagged by the Police Academy movies. The first took place at the titular academy. The second only had a brief scene there. The third and fourth took place there. The fifth and all subsequent films had brief scenes at the academy at best.
- The Mummy Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor did not feature the title character Imhotep ("the" Mummy). The villain was a mummy, but the movie might have been better titled "The Adventures of Rick O'Connell".
- Rush Hour. There's only one scene in the first movie where the title makes sense. As for the sequels, what does "rush hour" have to do with the crimes around the world?
- Back to the Future has some in-universe examples of this. In 1955, Lou's Café is a café owned by Lou Caruthers. By 1985, it has become Lou's Aerobic Fitness Center and, given his age in 1955, Lou is probably no longer the actual owner of the building (or if he is, he's just collecting rent money). Twin Pines Mall (or Lone Pine Mall, depending on which timeline you're in) was named after the tree farm which used to exist on the land. Twin Pines Ranch being changed to Lone Pine Ranch after Marty ran over one of the display trees is an example of averting this trope, resulting in the irony that the name later becomes the artifact anyway when the mall is built.
- The Bourne Series started off fairly clear with The Bourne Identity being about Jason Bourne trying to understand what he is, the two sequels The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum don't really make sense given the stories, but are a part of the book titles and thus they were kept. Some feel that had the titles been reversed for the second and third movies, they might have made more sense. The second film was Bourne telling the government to leave him alone (giving his "ultimatum"), and the third film was Bourne destroying the government conspiracy surrounding Treadstone (showing his "supremacy" over the government officials involved with it).
- The Bourne Legacy stretches this even further, starring a new character not named Bourne (the "legacy" is the aftereffects of Bourne blowing up Treadstone).
- Only the first Poison Ivy film actually has a protagonist named "Ivy". The other three do have protagonists with plant-themed names but that's about the only thing they have in common with the original.
- North By Northwest is a partial artifact title. On one level, it makes sense since it refers to Hamlet feigning madness as Cary Grant does. But on another level, the original draft of the script had set the ending in Alaska. The title only sort of made sense as a compass direction for the film's action in the original draft, but even less so when it was changed to Mount Rushmore.
- The film adaptation of Stephen King's short story collection Hearts in Atlantis is a fairly close adaption of the story "Low Men in Yellow Coats" (which takes up the bulk of the book), but it has nothing to do with the eponymous short story "Hearts in Atlantis". "Low Men in Yellow Coats" is about a boy who befriends a Cool Old Guy with psychic powers and tries to protect him from the mysterious men pursuing him, and "Hearts in Atlantis" is about a bunch of college kids who waste all their time playing Hearts (the card game) in their dorm room (which they call "Atlantis"), thus making the movie's title a bit baffling.
- The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia, as in the state, not a character. The entire film takes place there. Apparently the original title was The Haunting in Georgia before the suits decided the brand was more important.
- The characters in the Police Academy films graduated at the end of the first one, yet the series retains the name throughout—first with game subtitles trying to make it relevant like "Their First Assignment" and "Back in Training", but ultimately giving up as later installments take the action to Miami Beach and Moscow.
- The third and final The Hangover movie veers from the What Did I Do Last Night? formula of the previous two.
- Neither the title character nor his bar appear in Porky's II: The Next Day (Porky came back for the next one, though).
Literature
- Halfway through the Sister Fidelma series, Sister Fidelma of Kildare (where she was educated) renounces the religious life and starts referring to herself as Fidelma of Cashel (her home).
- In the Demon Headmaster novels, the titular Diabolical Mastermind is only a school headmaster in the first book, though he's referred to as the Headmaster throughout because that's the context the heroes first encountered him in.
- After book one, The Boxcar Children spend more time solving mysteries than encountering boxcars. They got the name because they lived in a boxcar for a while, but it sticks after they don't live there anymore.
- They do keep the boxcar as their hangout spot on the property where they live but it's still a stretch.
- Several English translations of The Phantom of the Opera translate the French "fantôme" as "ghost" within the text but, understandably, don't change the widely-known title; thus, the eponymous character is never actually called "phantom of the Opera" but "the Opera ghost."
- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy." Lampshaded with Mostly Harmless bearing the description, "The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy." Some later editions of the other novels include similar blurbs, and And Another Thing... is simply subtitled "Book 6 of 3".
- The Ranger's Apprentice series, after Will graduated from being an apprentice to being a full ranger.
- The Foundation Trilogy has an in-universe example. At first, "The Encyclopedia Foundation" was a N.G.O. focusing on the publishing of a compendium of all human knowledge. While they did eventually do that (sort of), the Foundation focused more on the Seldon's plan, and became an empire.
- The Inheritance Trilogy, published in four books. It was renamed The Inheritance Cycle. Making this more confusing is that there is now another fantasy series with the name, though this one managed to keep it to three books.
- Inverted with Francine Rivers’ The Mark of the Lion trilogy, in which actual marking by lions doesn't feature until the very end of the first book, and doesn't feature at all in the third. (Though it could easily be inferred to be an important metaphor, what with Jesus being referred to as the Lion of Judah.)
- The novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a book (Star Trek: The Novelization? Star Trek: The Novelization of the Motion Picture?)
- An in-universe example shows up in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. USR, the robot manufacturing corporation at the center of the plot, continues to call itself "United States Robotics" long after the United States have ceased to exist as a country.
- I, Robot itself is an artifact title. Its title was borrowed from an earlier story by Earl and Otto Binder. Not a single story in Asimov's book is told from the perspective of a robot.
- In the Shannara series, half the titles forget that Shannara is not the world, but a historical figure. This reaches its nadir with The First King of Shannara, which is about said historical figure and might better be titled King Shannara.
- Since the books follow the exploits of the descendants of Jerle Shannara, it could be argued that he is the first king of the Shannara line. But all the titles would make more sense if "Shannara" were replaced by "the Shannara bloodline" or "the Shannaras" or even "the Ohmsfords" since Jerle's family spends most of history with a new surname.
- Played straight in the most recent series, titled "Genesis of Shannara" and "Legends of Shannara". They take part long before the historical figure even existed and the only "genesis" in the first series is a new world.
- When Dr. Seuss published Green Eggs and Ham in 1960, the joke was on "green, eggs and ham", a common diner offering at the time in which the "green" was a vegetable side. Perhaps because of the book, you won't find it on any menus today.
- In the Doom series, the third and fourth novels, Infernal Sky and Endgame have fewer and fewer elements of the video game they're adapting.
Live Action TV
Magazines
- The magazine Protoculture Addicts, the name indicating its origins as a Robotech fanzine.
- Billboard magazine, the major trade publication of the music industry, was originally a trade paper for the billboard advertising industry. At least, that's what it was when it started. But the publication had shifted its focus to the entertainment industry (which, at the time, was a major user of billboard advertising) before the 19th century ended.
- The Japanese video game magazine Weekly Famitsu (and its various spin-offs) got its current name from an abbreviation of its original name, Famicom Tsūshin (officially translated as the Famicom Journal). When the magazine began, the Family Computer or Famicom (the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System) was the dominant game console in Japan and its name was used synonymously with video games in general, much in the same way the name "Nintendo" was used with video games in America during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Weekly Famitsu has since become a multiplatform magazine with a spin-off publication (titled Famitsu DS+Wii) that covers Nintendo systems exclusively.
- Enterbrain attempted to avoid using the "Famitsu" name when they started a PlayStation-centric spinoff magazine in 1996 called PlayStation Tsūshin. This idea fell through when they renamed the magazine Famitsu PS in 1999 and the magazine underwent a series of other renames throughout the years (Famitsu PS2, Famitsu PS+, Famitsu PSP+PS2) until ending publication in 2010.
- GQ is short for "Gentleman's Quarterly". It's been issued monthly for quite some time.
- Starting in 1999, Country Weekly was distributed fortnightly (once every two weeks). It finally reverted to a weekly in February 2009.
- Although the Radio Times still offers comprehensive radio listings (near the back of the magazine), chances are that most readers are there for the TV listings, the interviews or the previews of coming shows. There may not be quite as many national radio stations as there are national TV stations, but there are now 10 pages of TV listings for every 2 pages of radio listings.
- Similarly, in late 2008 and early 2009, TV Guide made a series of changes in its format, drastically reducing the amount of space given to actual TV listings (Cutting all but the grid-format listings first, then dropping several channels from the grids) and focusing more on celebrity-style reporting.
- The Economist:
- The magazine frequently posts disclaimers in its ads that it is not solely about economics or the economy, but a general news magazine. When founded in 1843, the title made a fair amount of sense, as it was indeed largely devoted to economic matters, and particular advocacy for the repeal of Britain's Corn Laws. By 1845, it has already broadened its scope considerably, and gained this full title: The Economist, Weekly Commercial Times, Bankers' Gazette, and Railway Monitor. A Political, Literary and General Newspaper. That title was eventually reduced to its more sensible but misleading original version.
- In addition, the editors invariably refer to the magazine itself as a "newspaper", even though it hasn't been published in a broadsheet format since at least the early 20th century.
- Australian Women's Weekly began as a weekly magazine in 1933. In 1982, it converted to a monthly frequency. The title stayed the same, both for reasons of familiarity and because the title Women's Monthly was deemed 'unseemly'.
- The now-defunct British publication Marxism Today was originally the theoretical journal of the British Communist Party, and read the way you'd expect. During its last years when Martin Jacques was the editor, however, it devoted itself to a more generally leftist critique of Thatcherism and gained a wider audience. The joke from both sides of the political spectrum was that the only Marxism in it was the title.
- Nintendo Power was half an example of this. Initially the second half of the title referred to the "power" it gave to Nintendo game players to beat the games they were playing, through included tips, strategies, and walkthroughs. Eventually it began to give up including tips and focused more on interviews and news, as anyone could just as easily look up a walkthrough or watch gameplay videos on You Tube.
- Auto Trader (the British magazine) has three examples of this: the editions 'Southern' (which now includes Wales and South West England), Midland (now covering Anglia and the Home Counties, extending beyond the Midlands), and North London & East of England (which is really In Name Only now, as it's amalgamated its content with the Midland edition). Both editions only survive due to the Grandfather Clause. In any case, the magazine's Periphery Demographic didn't really care... it still remains popular.
Music
- Alternative Rock used to be a less known alternative for the more mainstream sounds at the time of their origin. Nowadays it doesn't make as much sense due to popularity.
- New Wave: Thirty-five years and counting.
- Pop: These days if a ballad is released without any rock overtones, it's pop music, regardless of whether it is Popular or not.
- Indie: Even when the band is on a major label, their genre is still short for 'independent'.
- Emo. Originally used to refer to a less violent and confrontational, more personal type of hardcore punk that was emerging in Washington, D.C. in the 80s, the term is derived from "emocore", which itself was short for "emotional hardcore". Today, "emo" is used to describe a type of music that is barely distinguishable from pop-punk, and the fashion style and the association with any mental state other than "constantly happy". It is notable that some modern-day fans who don't know the history of the genre mistakenly believe it's short for simply "emotional".
- Some Chilean bands had one more member than the title suggest, because the last member joined shortly after the original inception and the rest wasn't too keen to change it:
- 'Los Tres' (The three ones) were 4 members.
- 'Los cuatro cuartos' (The four quarters) are 5 members.
- 'Banana 5' are 6 members
- An interesting example comes in the form of punk band Dillinger Four. Their name was originally The Young Dillingers after a name they saw in a record sleeve under the Thank You list. When it turned out to be the name of a local gang they changed it Dillinger Four. At the time of naming, they only had three members so it was just a silly joke. Then they added a second guitarist and the joke just sort of became a normal name.
- "Unchained Melody" was named after the movie it originally appeared in, Unchained. The movie is largely forgotten, but thanks to covers and use in other movies (most notably Ghost), the melody is still popular.
- The band Sleepytime Trio started out as a trio, but added a fourth member not too long after formation, and were a four-piece for almost their entire existence, yet they kept the name anyway.
- Underworld's famous "Born Slippy.NUXX" is a completely different tune from the obscure original song "Born Slippy". It only got named so because it was on the same EP. Thus, many people mistake it to be the original, especially remixers of the song who only credit is as "Born Slippy".
- This might be the best way to explain the stage name of singer P!nk. When she first started, she actually had pink hair◊. However, as time has gone by, she has changed it to blonde. Although, she says her stage name came from Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs, so it's possible that the hair was only dyed pink to explain the name, instead of the name coming from her hair.
- Heavy Metal changed drastically after Van Halen and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Early 70's bands such as Uriah Heep, Mountain, and Alice Cooper were considered to be Heavy Metal bands, but the term has changed to mean something different than what these bands sounded like.
- For that matter, the same thing happened to Power Metal (the original name for speed metal, now the name for fantasy metal) and Thrash Metal (which used to mean progressive speed metal with clean vocals whereas the modern equivalent is closer to 80s death metal).
- Occasionally, a musician from a band that has broken up will join a new band, and that band will use the old band's name to take advantage of the name recognition and/or record contract. Happened notably with Scorpions in the early 1970s.
- Pop insert-genre-here ends up sounding more pop than that genre. Fast.
- Much mainstream "Country Music" is contemporary pop or rock with a steel guitar and a singer with a twang. There's still a few successful artists that adhere to a more traditional sound, though.
- OMGG, a bluegrass band particularly notable for the fact that its bandmembers have all been playing since they were quite young - the name stands for "Obviously Minor Guys and a Girl". The oldest already isn't particularly "obviously" minor, and soon enough none of them will be.
- Few music "albums" have actually been a book of discs in sleeves ever since the LP format made it convenient to put ~50 minutes of music on just one. And that was several decades ago.
- Country music duo Baillie & the Boys had only one "boy" in it for several years following the departure of Alan LeBoeuf in 1988, leaving it as a husband-and-wife duo of Kathie Baillie and Michael Bonagura. They later signed on Roger McVay as an unofficial third member, but LeBoeuf returned in 1998.
- Subverted by the Thompson Twins. A trio at the height of their popularity (they had anywhere from four to six members in their early years), they became a duo after bassist Joe Leeway left.
- Secret Chiefs 3 started out as a trio, but kept the "3" in the name once they became Trey Spruance and a usually much larger, revolving door lineup.
- Christian Ska band Five Iron Frenzy's named their second album Our Newest Album Ever. And it technically was... until they released Quantity is Job #1 the following year.
- Japanese Power Metal band Versailles found out when they tried to perform in the US that there was already an American band named Versailles and changed their name to Versailles Philharmonic Quintet—a name which became awkwardly inappropriate after bassist Jasmine You's sudden death in 2009. While promoting their second album, they continued to use◊ the Versailles Philharmonic Quintet name despite only having four members. (The name became accurate again when support bassist Masashi joined the band proper in late 2010.)
- The "TVT" in now-defunct record label TVT Records technically stands for "TeeVee Toons": The label's first release was Television's Greatest Hits, a compilation of TV theme songs. Though TVT kept releasing the occasional collection of tv themes or commercial jingles throughout it's run, it became better known for music well outside that niche, signing successful acts such as Nine Inch Nails and Lil Jon.
- GRIMMS were a pop/comedy band formed in 1971 by members of the Scaffold, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and the Liverpool Scene; the band's name was formed from the initials of original core band members John Gorman, Andy Roberts, Neil Innes, Mike McGear, Roger McGough, and Vivian Stanshall. However, Stanshall left the band in 1972 and McGear followed a year later, so that only four of the members referred to in the band name were left in the band by their breakup in 1976; moreover, after their first two performances, the band expanded to include many additional members not referenced in their name.note Nine, to be exact, though not all at once. Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, Michael Giles, John Megginson, and George Money contributed to the first album, Grimms; Henri, Giles, and Money left in 1973 and were replaced by David Richards, Peter Halsall, and Gerry Conway for the second album, Rockin' Duck, while Patten left in 1974 and Halsall and Conway left in 1975 to be replaced by Timmy Donnell for the third album, Sleepers.
- The Air from J.S. Bach's Orchestral Suite No.3 in D major is commonly known as "Air on the G-String" after a once-popular arrangement created by 19th-century violinist August Wilhelmj, even though it is now more usually played in its original arrangement.note As the melody only covers a range of a minor tenth (A4-C6), it can be played quite easily on a single string; the original version can theoretically be performed entirely on the A string, but Wilhelmj transposed the piece down by a major ninth so that it could be played on the G string.
- Pretty much any band of youngsters identified as "boys", "girls" (maybe less so) or "kids" (i.e. Backstreet Boys, The Beach Boys, New Kids on the Block) where the members have grown up automatically becomes this.
- Snoop Dogg's stage name derives from Snoopy, a cartoon dog. When he changed his name to Snoop Lion, the "Snoop" part became an artifact.
New Media
- TV Tropes, which now covers video games, movies, comic books, literature and more.
- And with features such as Useful Notes, and subject pages that completely lack tropes, it's become more akin to Everything2 than anything its title would suggest. There have been efforts to curtail it
- The trope Awesome Moment of Crowning was a pun on "Crowning Moment of Awesome", a trope which was renamed to simply Moment of Awesome . Thus Awesome Moment of Crowning, while making sense and describing the trope, is now something of an artifact. It still sort of works, though, as the old Crowning Moment of Awesome name remains in common troper usage, even if it's not the actual title (its inverse, Dethroning Moment of Suck, is policed to avoid such Trope Decay, so that it remains about the worst moment for a person, not just any sucky moment).
- "Trope Repair Shop" which can be used to repair any page now.
- "Complaining about shows you don't like" policy page and the "List of shows that need summary" administrivia applies to any work, not just TV shows.
- The "You know that thing where" page is titled around the idea that the person posting the trope idea needs help gathering a title or examples for the trope ("You know that thing where this happens? What should we call that?"), but it's currently used as a general vetting procedure for all new trope ideas, even ones where the person posting the idea already has a good title in mind and a number of examples. It can also be used for works and indexes.
- The pmwiki part in any URL on this site. TV Tropes used to use an early version of PmWiki code, but has been developed and rewritten to the point where it is entirely separate.
- dennogumi.org was once a fansite about Cyber Team In Akihabara (Akihabara Denno Gumi). The webmaster then converted the domain into his general personal blog that has nothing to do with said series.
- When Fiveminute.net was first created, it was called Five-Minute Voyager because the only fivers were of episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. As the years went on and the scope increased, there were occasional efforts to rename. Even after the site moved to a new domain under its current title you'll still find more people calling it 5MV than 5M.net.
- deviantART: The Media Watch Dogs are hitting the site so hard that it's no longer "deviant". Also features a Group system where groups might not be art related.
- And this has led several people to switch over to Fur Affinity, despite the fact that they don't even draw furry art.
- Anime Feet is a blog, about, well Anime Feet (Of girls, that is). It soon drifted to more of "Animated Feet" as it included Avatar The Last Airbender or Justice League Unlimited, though that was still somewhat close to the original idea (Especially since the former is animesque), moreso compared to.... COSPLAYER FEET, which aren't even animated at all! And while some did cosplay as anime characters, there was stuff such as Lara Croft or even an Original Character. The cosplaying wasn't an one-off thing, it was the only thing posted for one month (During which the page had the subtitle "Cosplayers rule!", almost lampshading its decay). They even had another month dedicated to the actresses of the Harry Potter movies, which couldn't get further from anime if they tried. One wonders why they just don't change their name to "Female Feet", as outside the top banner there's been barely any anime feet whatsoever in a long time. To be exact, for the eight first months of 2011 they only had TWO updates featuring actual anime feet, and none by the site owner himself. In fact, the owner doesn't seem to care much about the artifact-ness, as in an update he said cheerfully he now posted a large variety of female feet from various mediums and while he listed stuff like film or comic books, he didn't list anime. (Well, it was included as part of "various animated feet", but the fact he couldn't even mention it standalone despite being the blog's name is kinda sad).
- Like TVTropes, The Internet Movie Firearm Database isn't restricted to just movies and includes guns from other visual mediums like television and video games.
Newspaper Comics
- Judge Parker fell under this trope during the 60s when the strip shifted focus to attorney Sam Driver and now still does as most of the plots revolve around the exploits of Sam or his rich wife Abbey and her adopted daughters Neddy and Sophie. In the late 2000s, the original Judge Parker started appearing more often, and became part of a few big plotlines, though largely as a supporting character. His son Randy Parker is a supporting character and, as of 2009, also a Judge now, thus making another Judge Parker part of the cast.
- Funky Winkerbean: the titular character isn't even seen that often; the strip now focuses much more on Les. This has apparently been true for decades, even back when it was a Lighter and Softer strip, if the stage musical Funky Winkerbean's Homecoming (where Les is the main character and Funky only has two scenes) is anything to go by. These days, it's debatabe which is the bigger artifact, the fact that the title character doesn't show up that often or that the title "Funky Winkerbean" suggests the Lighter and Softer strip it was at the start and not the Darker and Edgier Deus Angst Machina Diabolus ex Machina Crapsack World it's become infamous for.
- Robotman avoided this, changing the name to Monty after the title character left.
- Barney Google And Snuffy Smith has been all-Snuffy, no-Barney for decades. Barney Google does return to guest-star in the strip on very rare occasion; his last two appearances were in February of 2012 and January of 1997.
- The comic strip Luann for a while seemed to almost exclusively focus on the titular character's brother, Brad, and specifically his pursuit of fellow firefighter Toni.
- Alison Bechdel's Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip. In its earliest incarnation, she labeled a drawing "Marianne, dissatisfied with her morning brew: Dykes to Watch Out For, plate no. 27", "as if it were just one in a series of illustrations of mildly demonic lesbians" She drew more and more "plates", and kept the title when it shifted to a strip format about various aspects of lesbian culture, and also when it shifted to the serialized format with recurring characters. As the cast grew to include people of other genders and sexual identities, she lampshaded the title by titling a recent collection of her strips "Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-based Life-forms to Watch Out For"
- She saw this coming a long time ago, way back in 1992, in fact (The Plot Thickens, #145...one of those "noncanon" ones). Jezanna mentioned the prospects of a transgender character joning the strip, to which Toni replied, "Would we have to change the name of the strip? You know, to 'Dykes And Transgender Persons to Watch Out For?'"
- The comic strip Fritzi Ritz became so dominated by Fritzi's niece that it was eventually renamed as Nancy. Yeah, that "Nancy".
- Blondie, although still present, hasn't been the central or the funniest character in Blondie since the 1930s, when the strip got a revamp from being a silly strip about a flapper to a domestic comedy about Dagwood. Film versions, and the public at large, refer to the comic as "Blondie and Dagwood", for obvious reasons.
- Kudzu came to spend far more time on Rev. Will B. Dunn than on the young man named Kudzu.
- Steve Bell's If... has been published every weekday since 1982. The first two strips were titled If Dinosaurs Walked on Fleet Street..., the next two were titled If Turkeys Could Vote... and that was the last time he played with the title, which swiftly rendered it meaningless.
- Terry and the Pirates had an opening storyline at its outset which involved pirates, but Terry soon escaped from them, and the pirate reference in the title was meaningless for the succeeding decades of the strip's run.
- Baby Blues still has a baby, but she doesn't get the spotlight half as often as her first- and third-grade siblings.
- "Baby" referred to Zoe. That she wouldn't stay that way forever was something the creators readily acknowledged (and in fact made the subject of numerous strips).
- According the creators' website FAQ: "The way we see it is that your children are always your babies, no matter how big or old they get. Once a parent, always a parent. And right now we have no plans for having the MacPherson clan expand. Besides, with the amount of room given comic strips these days, we couldn't fit any more characters in the panels."
- To accomodate the three-panel strip in a more legible fashion, Garfield cartoonist Jim Davis developed a short, wide book format that came to be known as the "Garfield format". While many other strips began publishing in this format, Garfield itself switched to a more conventional square book starting in 2001, and the original "Garfield format" compilations have been republished in the square format.
- The titular daycare center of Safe Havens hasn't been a part of the strip since the mid-1990s, once the kids started aging in real time. The occasional references to it and the name "Havens" are sprinkled throughout the comic, but Safe Havens remains gone.
- In the early days (1919) of Thimble Theater (the strip that introduced Popeye), each strip was a parody of stage melodramas and silent movies where Olive Oyl and her boyfriend Harold Hamgravy played a different character each strip. Every strip would start with a short Cast of Characters list that told you which characters Olive and Harold would be playing. After just a few months of this, the format was dropped entirely, Olive's brother Castor Oyl was introduced, and Thimble Theater became more of a humorous adventure strip. So even when Popeye was introduced in 1929 and became a one man Spotlight-Stealing Squad, the strip had already been an Artifact Title for nearly a decade, even shortly after it debuted!
- Like its namesake at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Gasoline Alley is an artifact title. It began as a panel of "The Rectangle", where each of the Chicago Tribune's four staff artists drew one. In Frank King's, four guys (Walt Wallet, still part of the strip although he's a supercentenarian; and Doc, Avery and Bill, long dead by now) talked about cars, hence the name. It became popular enough to be spun off as a strip in 1918, with more characters who talk about a lot of other things besides characters (and who became the first to age together at a normal pace). Even by the 1950s, Mad was doing parodies noting that the strip seemed to have nothing to do with gasoline.
- The eponymous Little Orphan Annie was an orphan at first, but she met her good old "Daddy" Warbucks after less than two months. Time spent as an orphan: Less than sixty strips. Time spent not being an orphan: Thousands of strips.
Professional Wrestling
- The "CM" part of CM Punk's name. It first stood for "Chick Magnet" (appropriately enough), but has long since lost its original meaning. It now means whatever the hell Punk wants it to mean at the time.
- Triple H's Finishing Move, the Pedigree. It's a reference to his time as snotty Blueblood Heel Hunter Hearst Helmsley, a gimmick that he has long since abandoned. However, it is still occasionally referenced to whenever someone calls him "Hunter" instead of Triple H.
- Shawn Michaels nickname as "Sexy Boy." While Shawn is still good-looking, he's evolved past his old gimmick into that of the "Showstopper."
Sports
Baseball
- The MLB's Los Angeles Dodgers bear an artifact title, but it was somewhat obscure to begin with so no one really notices. (The club was originally called the "trolley dodgers", after a popular turn of the century nickname for Brooklynites.)
- Except for occasional "Turn Back the Clock" games, the Chicago White Sox haven't worn white socks since 1976.
- The Atlanta Braves originated in Boston in 1870, as the Red Stockings no less, but were not called the 'Braves' until 1912; John Montgomery Ward suggested the name Braves because the new owner, James E. Gaffney, was a member of Tammany Hall, which was named after a Native American chief and used an Indian image as its mascot. Tammany Hall doesn't even exist anymore, so the team is obviously not run by anyone associated with Tammany Hall. Everybody now just assumes it was just a team name someone picked.
- The Chicago Cubs (originally the Chicago White Stockings) were first called 'Cubs' around 1902; journalists were referring to how very young the players were.
- Venezuelan Baseball: the Navegantes Del Magallanes originally played in Caracas' then satellite town Los Magallanes de Catia, itself named after the famous marine. When the league made a "only one team for city" rule, the Magallanes team moved to the nearby city of Valencia, where there is no seashore, but they maintained the full name because it was too emblematic.
- Both of Major League Baseball's Triple-A level leagues have artifact titles ever since the American Association disbanded in 1997.
- The Pacific Coast League is the most evident. When it was founded in 1903, the team furthest from the Pacific Coast was in Sacramento. Now, they have teams in Des Moines, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Omaha, and Round Rock, Texas. Only three of their now 16 teams are even in states that border the Pacific, and only Tacoma is actually all 'that' close.
- When the International League was founded in 1886, the name was appropriate, two of its eight teams were in Canada. They even had a team in Cuba between 1954 and 1960. But the IL hasn't had a single team outside the US since the Ottawa Lynx moved and became the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs before the 2008 season.
Auto Racing
- NASCAR: The middle two initials stand for "Stock Car"; the cars haven't been stock since The Sixties, and the formula now includes such race-car-only features as tube chassis and a slightly more centered driver's position, and carburetors.
- Also carburetors, which very few cars still on the road have. In a NASCAR commercial running in Feb. 2010, a driver points out that even the "headlights" are actually a decal. (But they don't need real headlights, because the track is always lit.)
- All the open-wheel cars raced at Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the years when it only hosted the Indy 500 had long since switched over to using methanol, and now ethanol, as fuel, but they still call the garage area Gasoline Alley. Since the name of the eponymous comic strip (see above) is also an artifact of bygone days, this is an interesting example of a name that became artifactual in two entirely different contexts.
- However, when NASCAR started holding the Brickyard 400 there every year, the name still makes sense since its "stock cars" still use gasoline, albeit a specially-formulated high-octane racing blend that, while you could use it in your car, would make the engine knock like crazy.
- The Dakar Rally. Began as the Paris - Dakar Rally as that's precisely where it ran. Retained the Paris Dakar Rally name as it gradually became the "Various places in southern France to Dakar" rally. The race hasn't been held in Africa since 2007. A terrorist attack that killed four French tourists resulted in the cancellation of the 2008 race, and the event has been held in South America since 2009.
- In Formula One, during sessions and races when drivers' positions are listed on the side of the screen, they are identified by the first three letters of their last name... except Michael Schumacher, who was identified as 'MSC'. This trope is why: it's from when his brother Ralf Schumacher was also a F1 driver, they were identified as 'MSC' and 'RSC' to differentiate between the two Schumachers.
Hockey
- The Anaheim Ducks get more and more out of place every year considering the last The Mighty Ducks movie was released in 1996. Considering they no longer play in The Arrowhead Pond, but The Honda Center instead, the name is getting even further displaced.
- Somewhat averted when "Mighty" was dropped from the team name after Disney sold the team. The connection is still pretty unavoidable considering how Anaheim is home to Disneyland.
- The name of the Pittsburgh Penguins was inspired by the nickname of their home arena, "The Igloo", meaning they fell right into this after moving into the Consol Energy Center and the Igloo was demolished. Then again, it didn't make much sense in the first place.
- Subversions:
- The Atlanta Flames were named after the massive fire that nearly razed Atlanta during the American Civil War. Then they moved to Calgary, a city which was nearly razed by a massive fire in 1886.
- Many people assume that the Winnipeg Jets were named for Bobby Hull, the "Golden Jet", who played for the Jets for eight years, but the team was actually named for a previous minor-league team that existed before Hull joined the NHL. The name may instead refer to one of Winnipeg's main industries, the manufacture of jet aircraft parts. (Or it could simply be a cool name.)
- The Montreal Canadiens are an oft-unrecognized form of this trope. Their name doesn't refer to what are now called "Canadians" in the common sense. Rather, it refers quite specifically to French speakers in colonial times, as until surprisingly late in Canadian history the term specifically meant "French-speaker in the New World", as these were thought of as the "indigenous" of the non-aboriginal population (the English-speaking arrivals saw themselves as British for the most part). The team name comes from the original, amateur Club de Hockey Canadien — the term "Canadien" here distinguishing the francophone Québécois from the cross-town, English-speaking Montreal Maroons. Today, the word's connotations have changed 180 degrees, and "Canadien" is the last word that Quebec nationalists want to be called, so this trope is played straight. However, Québécois do know what the word actually means, and if Quebec were to separate from Canada, the team name would undoubtedly stay the same and not be thought of as contradictory.
- Five out of fourteen teams in Finnish major ice hockey league have word "ball" in their name. They were founded when football, bandy and Finnish baseball were the most popular sports, but nowadays only TPS ("Turku Ball Club") has any activity outside ice hockey.
- The National Hockey League itself is now technically an international hockey league, with teams from both Canada and the USA.
- Similar to the baseball's Pacific Coast League, the East Coast Hockey League (or the ECHL as now refers to itself) has not been East Coast-centric ever since the merger with the Western Hockey League in 2002. It's gotten to the point where the league now has a team in Anchorage, Alaska, which is about as far West as you can go and still be in North America.
Basketball
- Basketball no longer requires players to throw a ball into an empty peach basket.
- The Los Angeles Lakers get their name from their earlier location of Minnesota, "Land of 10,000 Lakes". LA has five.
- Subverted by the San Diego Rockets, so-called because the city built rockets, missiles and jets, moved to Houston, where NASA's Mission Control is located.
- Similarly subverted by the Pistons. They began as the Fort Wayne Pistons, named after one of the products original owner Fred Zollner's company made. After a decade, Zollner moved the team to Detroit, and, as the city was/is the heart of the American automobile manufacturing industry, kept the name.
- The Utah Jazz, originally from New Orleans. They moved to Salt Lake City in 1979 but didn't change the name, allegedly because because the team's then-owner thought it would be a temporary stop and they'd move again soon. They didn't.
- The Memphis Grizzlies are named after a bear species that doesn't live anywhere near Tennessee, but does live in British Columbia, as the team was originally based in Vancouver.
- The New Orleans Hornets draw their name from the nickname of Charlotte ("Hornet's Nest", as General Cornwallis described the city as "a hornet's nest of rebellion" during the American Revolution).
- Finally averted in 2012, when the team announced they would be changing the name to the Pelicans, Louisiana's state bird. And Charlotte's team, the Bobcats, followed suit by saying they take the Hornets name back.
Football
- College football's Liberty Bowl game was so named because it was originally played in Philadelphia, but it moved after just five games there (1959-63), first for a one-year stay in Atlantic City, then to its permanent home in Memphis.
- The American Football positions "Halfback" and "Fullback." Judging by the names, one would think that the fullback would line up further behind the halfback, but in many modern offensive formations the fullback lines up ahead of the halfback or at the same distance (so as to block for the halfback).
- Soccer is the same. Fullbacks play as the "wings" of a back 4, yet are not very full in most cases, and not very back as well. The name comes from the ancient 2-3-5 formation, wherein the two back players, or "fullbacks", got pushed out to the side to accompany first the "halfback", now the sometimes called central defender or center back, who dropped in from the middle of the 3. Next was another central back, which finally altered it so the "fullbacks" play on the wing with attacking intent while the "halfbacks" stay back and defend 90% of the time.
- The "onside kick" in American football. Originally this referred to a rugby play in which the team that had the ball could kick it downfield and anyone who was "onside"—namely, the kicker and anyone who was behind him—could advance downfield and recover the ball. Players on the kicking team who were "offside" at the time of the kick—ahead of the kicker when he kicked the ball—were not eligible to recover it. This play is still part of rugby, but in American football it has come to refer to a special kickoff play. In this "onside kick", the kicker kicks the ball in a way that gives his team the best chance to reccover the ball, usually by kicking the ball sideways along the line of scrimmage rather than straightaway downfield. All players line up behind the kicking line, so there is no more onsides or offsides and the term in American football is a misnomer.
- Division names in the NFL suffer from this, especially before the 2002 realignment. New teams occasionally joined the league, and divisions ranged from four to six teams. By 1995 most of the NFC Western division's teams were east of the Mississippi River. Reluctance to break up traditional rivalries kept these divisions in place until the league finally reached 32 teams in 2002, allowing a realignment into eight equal-sized divisions. It didn't happen without a fight, and there are still oddball things like Dallas in the East and St. Louis in the West, as preserving established rivalries was considered far more important than geographically logical divisions.
- Two stadiums used primarily by the NFL had, for a time, naming rights held by corporations that were otherwise no longer in existence: Psi Net.com Stadium in Baltimore (now M&T Bank Stadium), which kept that name for a couple of seasons after PS Inet.com went under in the dot-com crash, and Enron Field in Houston, home to the Astros as well as the Texans.
- As this Onion article points out, the Steelers' name refers to an industry that is no longer very prominent in Pittsburgh, though one could argue that the name is nowadays an homage to the city's heritage.
- The Tennessee Oilers were a brief historical example of this. This was done intentionally, because when the team moved from Houston the owner wanted to make sure that all of the team's history would still be "owned" by him, and that a new Houston Oilers team couldn't be formed later. Which is exactly what had happened with the Cleveland Browns when they moved and became the Baltimore Ravens; 4 years later a new Cleveland team was formed that took the name and history of the old Browns.
- This 'almost' happened with the Kansas City Chiefs. They were founded as the Dallas Texans in 1960, and when Lamar Hunt moved the team to Kansas City in 1963, he originally intended for them to keep their name. So they'd be the Kansas City Texans.
Soccer
- Donegal Celtic football (soccer) club are actually based in Belfast, over 100 km from County Donegal. It was founded by men from parts of the city that have Donegal-derived names (Lenadoon, Gweedore, Glenveagh, etc.) and has no connection to the actual place.
- Many soccer teams in the former Soviet Union have the same issue as the Steelers, mentioned above — Metalist Kharkiv, Otelul Galati (Otelul being Romanian for 'steel'), Rotor Volgograd, Lokomotiv Moskow.
- The name "CSKA" is very common in eastern European soccer teams; in several Slavic languages, it abbreviates "Central Sport Club of the Army", even though none of the clubs are army clubs any more.
- Many English soccer teams:
- Crystal Palace F.C. were founded by workers at London's Crystal Palace, which burned down in 1936.
- Arsenal F.C. was founded by workers at Woolwich Arsenal, in south-east London. Since 1913 they have been based in Highbury, north London.
- Sheffield Wednesday is derived from the Wednesday Cricket Club (est 1820), which played all its matches on Wednesdays. They set up a football team in 1867 which eventually became far more successful, and, needless to say, plays games on all days of the week.
- Milton Keynes Dons get their name from their predecessor club, Wimbledon F.C.
- Millwall F.C. are another London example, leaving Millwall for South London in 1910. Their current home ground is in Bermondsey.
- Preston North End originally played in the north end of the town, but since 1875 have been based in Deepdale, in the centre of Preston.
- Leyton Orient seem to have got their name because one of their players worked for the Orient Shipping Company.
- Accrington Stanley take their name from a team named Stanley Villa, based at the Stanley Arms on Stanley Street. They now play at a ground on Livingstone Road.
- Port Vale are actually located in Stoke, which has neither port nor valley. The name was taken from the pub where the club was founded.
- Grimsby Town F.C. moved to Cleethorpes in 1898 — admittedly only three miles away, but still a separate town.
- The Brazilian "Club of 13" biggest soccer teams has 20 members.
- Also, Palmeiras' stadium is Palestra Itália, as the team still had that name when it purchased it (they changed it in the 1940s as references to Axis countries became illegal). And its nickname is the previous name of the venue, Parque Antarctica (as it was started by the eponomynous beverage company).
- Since 1974, the trophy for winning the FIFA World Cup has not been a cup.
- Since 2011, the English Premier League has had at least one Welsh team.
Other
- Track and field is still officially known as "athletics"—a holdover from ancient Greece.
- Rugby union club London Irish was founded in London for Irish immigrants — they now play in Reading (40 miles from London) and as of January 2011 had only two Irish players.
- An Artifact Nickname: Brazilian swimmer Fernando Scherer is known in his country as "Xuxa", a nickname he earned in his youth for having golden locks similar to an eponymous TV host from that country. Ever since he became a professional swimmer, he is bald (in that sport, it's either that or a swim cap).
- The UK's premier tennis venue, home of Wimbledon Championships, is formally named the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. This is a deliberate adoption of this trope: though croquet was dropped, and the name changed to reflect this in 1882, the current name was instated in 1889, for sentimental reasons. note The "All England" part of the name isn't really indicative either, as the club's orbit extends across the whole of the UK. The "Lawn" part is, though: Wimbledon is now the only grand slam event played on grass.
- Ultimate Fighting Championship is a fascinating case study:
- The men who started it all, in particular Rorion Gracie, meant "Ultimate"; i.e. the only time it would ever be held. Furthermore, Gracie made it quite clear that this was largely a vanity project to promote Brazilian jiu-jitsu. (That's why no one ever considered the long-term consequences of the unrestrained violence and inevitable political backlash; there weren't supposed to be any.) Only after it became a huge hit on pay-per-view did SEG decide to turn it into a franchise.
- The catchall "Fighting" was used due to the multitude of fighting styles (which the early marketing hyped up very heavily). However, public outcry made no-holds-barred combat almost impossible to sell, and after numerous flops like Art Jimmerson, Steve Nelmark, and Emmanuel Yarborough, it became clear that having a whole bunch of styles produced mostly boring curbstomps. As the sport evolved, fighters who knew only standup, or only ground fighting, or only submissions, etc., began losing out to the new breed who learned multiple skills. The term for this was "mixed martial arts", which was continually honed and refined to the point where it became a discipline in its own right. Now undisciplined brawlers and single-stylists aren't even allowed to try out.
- The "Championship", up until the second Ultimate Ultimate, was an 8-man single elimination tournament with no weight classes. (The only exceptions were 2, which had 16 men, and 9, which was all one-off matches.) The "champion" was the winner of the tournament, like in tennis. The system showed its flaws as early as 3...two words: Steve Jennum. Lack of weight classes proved to be a problem in 10 when Marc Coleman beat Don Frye without ever being threatened because he was bigger and stronger. But the death knell was 11, in which Coleman had no opponent for the final and was granted the championship by default. In response to this, UFC split into "Heavyweight" and "Lightweight" divisions in 1997 and reduced the tournaments to 4 men each, switching between the two divisions at irregular intervals. SEG began doing away with the tournament format after 17, and the last one ever held was 23.
- Mixed martial artist Nick Thompson was originally nicknamd "the Fainting Goat" due to the frequency at which he was knocked out. When he got more experience and delivered a tougher chin, his nicknamed got shortened to just "the Goat," which has no relevance or meaning.
- The Big Ten Conference, in recent years, has never actually had 10 teams. Penn State joined in the early 90's, taking it up to 11 (the logo was then updated to include an "11" in negative space to represent this). It got even better when Nebraska joined in 2011, their departure from the Big Twelve Conference (along with Colorado to the Pac-10, which will have 12 members with the addition of Colorado and Utah) results in the Big Twelve having ten members and the Big Ten having twelve. The Big Ten, with its eponymous network and 100 years of history, will not be relinquishing its name to the fifteen year-old Big Twelve, which may just raid the Mountain West Conference anyway.
- From the time the University of Chicago left the conference in 1946 to the time Michigan State joined four years later, they had only 9 teams.
- However, they are outdone by the Atlantic 10 Conference, which has 14 full members.
- Both are topped by the Northeast-10 Conference of Division II, which has 16 members.
- The Pac-10 averted this with a 2011 expansion, it at least re-named itself the Pac-12 with the addition of Colorado and Utah. However, the "Pac" part (short for "Pacific") has been something of an artifact since 1978, when Arizona and Arizona St. joined the then Pac-8 to become the Pac-10.
- The SEC abandoned the "Southeastern" part of their name (or at least stretches it right up to the breaking point) with the inclusion of Texas A&M (located in what's considered part of the American Southwest) and Missouri (Midwest) in 2012.
- Australian Rules Football: As the AFL expanded from a Victorian to a national competition, many Victorian clubs lost their connections to the suburbs they were named after. Collingwood, Hawthorn and St Kilda no longer have any ties to their namesake suburbs, and (except for Melbourne) the rest of the suburban grounds are used only for training and social purposes (the league's nine Melbourne-based teams have a grand total of two home stadiums)
Stand-Up Comedy
- Daniel Whitney created the Larry The Cable Guy persona for a radio show. Early on, he actually was pretending to be a cable guy, but that part of the character was phased out in favor of the Southern-flavored comedic character he is now.
- This was lampshaded when Whitney and his character starred in the movie Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000 has been poised just on the brink of year 41000 for twenty years. In fact, the timeline of the universe given in the latest rule book ends with the date "995.999.M41" - that is, around 20:30 o'clock on the 30th of December, year 40999. Just how many more events they can squeeze into the remaining approximately 27 hours, 29 minutes, 59 seconds, 999 milliseconds etc. is an open question. Maybe they'll call in Jack Bauer.
- In fact, they've debatedly already gone into and past the year 41000. The December 30th, 40999 date in question is attached to the beginning of the 13th Black Crusade, the fate of which was determined in 2004 by a worldwide player-driven story campaign (Chaos won a narrow, almost Pyrrhic Victory, and the Tau capitalized on the situation to expand their territory by 33%). However, more recent works never talk about the aftermath of the crusade, rather talking about how the Imperium is getting ready for the crusade in year 40999, indicating that Games Workshop is probably trying to rewind the timeline.
- The 13th Black Crusade isn't the only time they've dabbled in the 42nd millennium - Jenit Sulla's memoirs were published in around 101.M42.
- Although the Horus Heresy novels, set in the same universe 10000 years before, still retain the "40000" part of the title.
- Also, the "40000" part was there originally to mean that this was the future of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Now that the two games have been set in completely different universes, that connection is completely lost.
- The Dungeons & Dragons Spelljammer setting didn't really have a whole lot of dungeons, being, y'know, a magical Age of Sail in SPACE. It did use the D&D core rules, just with added sailing ships.
- Likewise, as of 3E, the Ravenloft setting is officially home to just one dragon, making the plural inappropriate. Her mate is only a Dread Possibility.
- The Dungeons & Dragons Dark Sun setting could be more accurately describe as Deserts and Dragon (just the one, thanks.).
- Magic: The Gathering. "The Gathering" was intended to be the name of the first game, and later expansions would add a corresponding subtitle, such as Magic: Ice Age. However, the creators eventually realized it would be bad for gameplay if cards from different sets had different logos on the backs, and once they were stuck printing "the Gathering" on every card, putting too much effort into subtitles that people would rarely see seemed like a waste.
- The same thing happened with the Deckmaster logo still printed on the bottom part of every card's back when the Deckmaster series of card games haven't been involved with the product in years.
- The spin-off variant known as "Elder Dragon Highlander" required you to include one of the five legendary "Elder Dragon" cards in your deck. This requirement was eventually loosened to require any legendary creature and the name was shortened to "EDH," which made no sense whatsoever to people who were unfamiliar with the original. (Ultimately Wizards of the Coast officially renamed the format "Commander.")
- The upkeep step was named that because many of the early cards had an upkeep cost that needed to be paid each turn. Nowadays, it's mostly used as a convenient time for abilities to trigger more-or-less at the start of the turn.
- As tabletop wargames evolved into fantasy role-playing, the particular world created by the DM nevertheless continued to be known as a "campaign".
Theme Parks
- The original Six Flags theme park was Six Flags Over Texas. The name referred to the six different countries that have governed Texas - Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederate States - and the park retains a theming based around the state's history. The Six Flags company has opened many more parks in other states throughout the United States, but needless to say, none of those states have ever had six flags over them- nor do the parks have any real theming.
- The Busch Gardens parks in Williamsburg, VA and Tampa Bay, FL got their names after the Anheuser-Busch brewing company which also owned Sea World. In 2009 AB sold their entertainment corporation to the Blackstone group but the parks are still permitted to use the Busch name.
Toys
- Polly Pocket dolls were originally called that because the doll was less than an inch high and the whole play-set closed in on itself and fit easily into your pocket. This has not been referenced in years, as Polly has grown to be much taller and her play-sets expansive.
Video Games
- Broken Sword is named after the legendary Broken Sword of Baphomet from the first game and to be honest whilst it is an important plot element to the story it doesn't get a lot of screen time and is mentioned maybe about 5 times at most. Later games don't have anything to do with the sword.
- Except the third game, which involved a different(?) broken sword.
- Mega Man Star Force suffers this in the English versions of the games since it uses the first game's Super Mode as part of the title, which then struck but the second game - which had the added subtitle of "tribe" - had absolutely nothing to do with the star force. The Japanese title is the more sensible Shooting Star Rockman; this is fixed in the third game, where the heroes form a team they intentionally named after the ability the Satellite Admins gave Mega Man in the first game.
- The first Ace Attorney game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, was released in America after the third game in the series (Gyakuten Saiban 3) was already out in Japan. When it became obvious that the protagonist in the fourth game was not going to be Phoenix Wright, but a new character, Capcom changed the emphasis of the western logos and branding to make "Ace Attorney" the franchise's title, while keeping the "Phoenix Wright" portion as a supertitle for the first two sequels.
- Crusader Kings. In the sequel, you are no longer restricted to play as a King in the age of Crusades.
- In Earth 2160, the plot no longer takes place on Earth as the planet is destroyed at the end of Earth 2150.
- Final Fantasy got its title because its main designer, Hironobu Sakaguchi, contemplated on quitting Square if his next game bombed and he decided that his potentially "final" game would be a "fantasy" RPG. Thus "Final" has technically been an artifact ever since Final Fantasy II. This goes even further when the title is applied to spin-offs that have no connection to the main Final Fantasy game and follows a completely different format.
- Still made some sense when each game was singular and unrelated to the rest of the series; it was the final fantasy of that world. That went away with X-2 (and XIII-2).
- Final Fantasy Tactics A2 - the A stands for "Advance", as in the Game Boy Advance, which is the platform the first title was on. This was retained to try and distinguish the two portable-only entries as a sub-series distinct from the first title, Final Fantasy Tactics.
- The Soul series begins with Soul Edge, which was then followed by Soulcalibur. All the sequels afterward are titled Soulcalibur with a number. Technically this isn't an artifact title, because the weapon actually called Soul Calibur is still in the series, but so much focus is put on Soul Edge that it just doesn't matter. In Soulcalibur II, EVERYONE gets a form of Soul Edge as one of their weapons, while you can count Soul Calibur wielders on the fingers of a single hand! This includes the silly guest fighters Link, Spawn and Heihachi (who fights bare handed).
- The title change was a result of Namco wanting to avoid legal issues with infamous trademark troll Tim Langdell of Edge Games, who wanted royalties due to the use of the word "Edge." This was also the reason why the PS port of the original Soul Edge was retitled Soul Blade overseas.
- The creator of the series wanted to title each game after a different sword, in a similar way to the Tales series, but it never happened because Soulcalibur was so successful they wanted to keep the series name recognisable. Because of this, the first game became obscure, even though it was very popular at the time.
- Similarly, Soulcalibur V director Daishi Odashima wanted to name the game Soul Edge 2 in attempt to do away with this, but was shot down. The only feasible way SCV, the sixth game in a series running since 1995, could get away with that would be if the game was titled "Soulcalibur V: Soul Edge 2", like how Yoshi's Island was Super Mario World 2 (or even how Super Mario World was given the subtitle Super Mario Bros 4 in Japan). In all fairness, Soul Calibur's emphasis in the story, while still eclipsed by its sibling sword, has been on a bit of an upturn recently, thanks to its Not So Different Knight Templar tendencies in SCIV and SCV. The number of Soul Edge and Soul Calibur wielders, canonical or not, has also balanced out more evenly since SCII and not everyone is able to obtain a version of Soul Edge starting in SCIII.
- There is no "Fire Emblem" in the Jugdral games (Genealogy of Holy War and Thracia 776). A small piece of dialogue in the former mentions a "Crest of Flames" (in Japanese, unlike the title's Gratuitous English), but that's as close as it gets. The rest of the series avert this, by calling the MacGuffin of each game "(The) Fire Emblem."
- In The Sacred Stones, as well as the Tellius saga, the Fire Emblem is merely an alternate title of the MacGuffin, while most people refer to it by other names (the Sacred Stone of Grado and Lehran's Medallion, respectively).
- The Advance Wars series was no longer on the Game Boy Advance when the series moved on to the Nintendo DS with its third and fourth installments, Advance Wars: Dual Strike and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. The title can still be justified, since "Advance" by itself is still a real word. On the other hand, the Japanese version of the series reverted to the even more antiquated Famicom Wars name for its GameCube (Battalion Wars), Wii (Battalion Wars II) and DS installments.
- In the early games of the Metal Gear series, a major part of each game's plot involve destroying the brand new Metal Gear tank in the hands of the enemy. Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4 emphasizes the Patriots conspiracy in which the main characters are involved with, while reducing the role the mecha has in the plot. Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater, a prequel to the previous games, has no mecha with the Metal Gear name, but a tank that fills its role, as well as a single scene involving the original creator of the Metal Gear itself showing his plans to Naked Snake.
- The NES port of Metal Gear left out the Metal Gear itself (the tank is still mentioned, but the player has to destroy a Super Computer that controls its activities instead of Metal Gear itself).
- The meaning of the original Metal Gear Solid's title is twofold: it was the third game in the series (following the MSX games Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2) and it was the first one developed in 3D (produced during the early days of 3D gaming).
- Marathon refers to the titular starship of the first game, which has been conquered and dismantled for at least 17 years in the last two games. At least Durandal, and sometimes even Tycho, still identify themselves by the Marathon emblem. So they're kinda trying.
- Net Hack is an odd variant of this trope. It was named back in the 80s, originating as Hack, as in Hack And Slash. The Net part was added when the original author turned development over to the DevTeam, who work together over the Usenet. Both elements of the title still hold true, but in today's day and age most people looking at the title would assume it was a game about being a Playful Hacker, rather than a high fantasy dungeon-fest.
- Galaxy Angel is a strange inversion, a straight example and the logical extreme all at the same time. The main characters are only called the Galaxy Angels in the third game, where before they are called the Moon Angels. Come Galaxy Angel II, though, they're back to Moon Angels and their replacement main characters are the Rune Angels, so there are no Galaxy Angels. And in the anime and its sequel, they're just Angels, and the name "Galaxy" isn't mentioned at all...except in the English version.
- Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn had nothing to do with the city of Baldur's Gate, though at least it did take place in and around Amn.
- Similarly, only the original campaign of Neverwinter Nights has anything to do with the city of Neverwinter. Shadow of Undrentide starts in Hilltop and never visits the city, and Hordes of the Underdark starts in Waterdeep and traverses the Underdark and the infernal planes, again never visiting Neverwinter. Neverwinter Nights 2 finally returns to the titular city.
- ...Then Mask of the Betrayer promptly leaves it again.
- The House of the Dead was named as such because it took place in a mansion. Naturally, none of the sequels feature said mansion - though the first stage in Overkill takes place in a mansion.
- On a similar note to House of the Dead, due to copyright issues with the original title of Resident Evil (Biohazard), the dev team came up with the former as a reference to the mansion that the first game was set in. Also like HOTD, no other game later in the series is set in a mansion, with the exception of the mansion holding Umbrella's trainee classrooms in Resident Evil 0 (and the game starts out on a train). The Japanese title, Biohazard, can last because it references the viruses that drive the plot.
- The two Time Crisis games with Richard Miller (the original and the obscure PSX-only Project Titan) have a timer that starts at 60 seconds, and every section cleared adds a certain amount of time. The game ends if it runs out. That's where the title comes from, the constant race against time. Every game since (including the companion games Crisis Zone and Razing Storm) has a timer which resets after a section is cleared, and also resets if you take a hit. Furthermore, if it runs out, you only lose one life box (and this also resets the timer). Speed is vastly less important now; it's all about recognizing enemy patterns and accuracy, and almost nobody has had time run out on them.
- Completely done away with by the FPS levels of 4's Complete Mission, which have no time limits whatsoever.
- Lufia qualifies in America, as the character for which the series is named only appeared in the first game, Lufia And The Fortress Of Doom. Notably, the series is titled Estopolis in Japan. Since the first game was not released in Europe, the European localization of Lufia II Rise Of The Sinistrals renamed the Dual Blade to the Lufiasword in order for the title to make an ounce of sense.
- Shin Megami Tensei. The first two games in the series weren't Shin Megami Tensei at all, but rather Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, based on a late-80s sci-fi novel. "Megami Tensei" means "Reincarnation of the Goddess", which is only a plot point in the very first title (where one of the characters is the reincarnation of the Japanese goddess Izanami). Furthermore, the "Shin" in the title is actually a pun: "Shin" meaning "new" was often appended to the titles of franchises that made the jump to the SNES in much the same way as "Super", but the "Shin" in "Shin Megami Tensei" means "true". Interestingly enough, Shin Megami Tensei is more of an Artifact Title in the U.S. than it is in Japan, where most MegaTen games aren't actually prefixed with the Shin Megami Tensei name: by contrast, every Shin Megami Tensei game released in the U.S. (save for Jack Bros, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, and DemiKids ) have been released in the U.S. under either the Shin Megami Tensei banner, or in the case of Atlus' earlier attempts (Persona and Last Bible/The Demon Slayer), the "Revelations" name.
- The Quake series. Quake was a codename for the villain of the first game (who turns out to be Shub Niggurath in the end). For whatever reason, they kept the name (which was also the name of the game engine). Quake II was supposed to have a different title on release; id discovered too late that it was trademarked, so they went with a name that they already had the rights to. It just kinda snowballed from there.
- Quake's Artifact Title goes deeper than that - Quake was the name of the game's original protagonist from the game's planning stages, when the game was being developed as a side-scrolling Action RPG under the title Quake: The Fight for Justice starring an unstoppable barbarian god.
- The Puzzle League series was originally called that because of Pokémon Puzzle League, in which the main story mode had Ash battling through the Puzzle League, a puzzle-game version of the regular Pokemon League, but now they don't use Pokemon for it anymore, instead opting for generic motifs.
- Guitar Hero isn't purely guitar from World Tour onwards.
- And Rock Band isn't purely Rock, now that Harmonix have been offering Downloadable Content from genres like pop, country and funk. Some people take issue with this, but Harmonix themselves insist that the Rock Band moniker doesn't refer to the kind of music played, but the ensemble itself.
- Mortal Kombat series. The titular tournament hasn't actually been held since the second game in the series. To be fair, spelling aside, the games still are arguably about "Mortal Kombat" in concept if not in reference to the tournament.
- The Elder Scrolls. The eponymous scrolls are really only important in the first and (numerically) fifth games; otherwise, they appear only in a faction quest-line. In fact, the title was only chosen because it sounded cool: someone at Bethesda Softworks came up with the term, and then the developers decided what the scrolls actually were for.
- Arena, the title of the first game in the series, also is an example. The original concept for the was a team based, gladiator game where the player took his team from arena to arena fighting in tournaments. None of this stuff was even coded into the game, but the advertising material had already been produced, so they kept the title despite arenas and gladiator combat not actually being in the game in any form. They got around this by adding a Title Drop to the intro that mentions Arena as a nickname for Tamriel.
- Also, M'aiq the Liar was first in Morrowind as an Author Avatar offering cryptic take-thats. His later appearances have significantly toned down the in-universe untruthfulness.
- The First Encounter Assault Recon group is not present in FEAR 2, nor are the subjects of Project Origin, which was only picked as the (sub)title because Monolith didn't have the rights to the FEAR name at the time.
- Far Cry 2 has nothing to do with the first game or its expansions, though some say otherwise.
- The Street Fighter games have plenty of fighting, but most of the stages aren't actually set in streets at all. The movie, on the other hand, doesn't have much fighting at all.
- In fact, very few of the martial artists in the series are truly "street fighters" by the very definition. The only real examples are Cody and Birdie. You could arguably include some or most of the transplants from the Final Fight series, honestly — even Sodom's skills are self-taught and he works as an enforcer for a crime racket.
- At least in the first game, the title more or less fit the premise, a rootless warrior seeking battles with worthy opponents around the world strictly for the sake of the fight. Ryu hasn't changed much since then, but over the years his simple story has been overshadowed by the great secret evil organization and soul transferences and memory loss and human cloning and DNA scarring and sinister agents with artificial body parts and Dark Hado and competing wrestling leagues and that other great secret evil organization etc. etc.
- The Alpha series, Third Strike, and Super Street Fighter IV are at least half-subversions as well. While the aforementioned evil organizations were at the center of the plot, there was no actual tournament going on (in the case of the 3S, the tournament had mostly wrapped up by the time Second Impact ended/Third Strike begun, whereas SSFIV is simultaneously set during IV's tournament and right after its close); the various cast members were simply touring the world and challenging each other to fights basically everywhere while attempting to get to the bottom of it all.
- The original Final Fight got its title since the game's plot involved Haggar, a retired pro wrestler who sets off to take justice into his own hands and challenge the Mad Gear gang for his "final fight". However, quite a few Final Fight sequels (2, 3, Revenge, and Streetwise) were released afterward, all involving Haggar being brought back out of retirement again to face newer enemies.
- The Silent Hill games have generally avoided this trope by having all of their protagonists visit Silent Hill at some point within the game - the only exception being Silent Hill 4, which takes place in South Ashfield ("a few hours' drive away"). While it's revealed that the protagonist has gone to Silent Hill in the past, he never visits it in the game, only coming as close as the woodlands surrounding the town. There are several references to the town regarding several character backstories, but none really justify the title.
- This almost occurred in the NES version of Double Dragon, but the developers managed to work around it. The original arcade version allowed up to two players simultaneously, taking control of twin martial artists named Billy and Jimmy Lee (hence the game's title). When working on the NES version, the programmers were unable to adapt the arcade's 2-players co-op mode. Since the title wouldn't have made much sense with just one of the Lee brothers, the other one now appears as the final boss after Machine Gun Willy (the final boss from the arcade version) is defeated.
- Siblings battle also occur in the arcade version when two players defeat Willy together. Whereas in the arcade version the Lee brothers fought each other over Marian's affections, in the NES version it is revealed that Jimmy Lee was the true leader of the Black Warriors.
- The later Game Boy version played this straight, as it lacked both, the 2-player co-op mode and the final battle with Jimmy. However, this version does feature a one-on-one versus minigame via link cable where the second player controls Jimmy (which itself was a carry-over from the NES game).
- The arcade version of Double Dragon 3 allowed up to three players simultaneously depending on the game's settings. The third player controls a previously-unseen/unmentioned Lee brother named Sonny, meaning that the titular duo became a trio. "Triple Dragon" apparently didn't have the same ring to it.
- Despite being based on the core gameplay elements of Painkiller, the fan-developed Mission Pack Sequel Painkiller Overdose removes the titular Painkiller weapon (a weed whacker) and replaces it with the RazorCube (a cube that breaks into sharp pieces and spins around really fast).
- Alone In The Dark 2008: you're not alone, and it's not dark (because everything is on fire).
- Made especially ironic because the fire physics are the best part of the game. Subverted slightly (but no less ironically) when an upgraded version was given the subtitle Inferno.
- In Europe, the early Contra games for home consoles were released under the title of Probotector. This was because the European versions of the games replaced the original human commandos with robotic counterparts called "Probotectors", which comes from a portmanteau of "robot" and "protector". When the Game Boy installment of the series, Operation C, was re-released in Europe as part of the Konami GB Collection, it restored the original human main character, but still kept the Probotector title.
- Dynasty Warriors: Gundam doesn't involve any dynasties, Chinese or otherwise, it simply got the title for being a Gundam-themed spinoff of the Dynasty Warriors series. The Japanese title is Gundam Musou (a play on Sangoku Musou, the Japanese title of the Dynasty Warriors series).
- In the original Backyard Baseball, there were only three fields that did not take place in a backyard: Sandy Flats, Tin Can Alley, and Cement Gardens. In Backyard Baseball 2010, only one field does take place in a backyard: the Webber Estate. See how much that has changed.
- Interesting case: The producers of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 initially wanted to drop the "Call of Duty" supertitle, but re-appended it to the game's standard packaging and press releases after they took a few surveys and realized removing it decreased brand awareness. On the other hand, in-game menus and the console/PC refer to the game without the supertitle, and the developers officially call it just Modern Warfare 2 to indicate its status as a new IP. So while Call of Duty is still an Artifact Title, that only applies to the game's publicity campaigns.
- Not that Call of Duty could ever really become an artifact anyway (unless they changed the game to being about surviving being stranded on an alien planet or something weird). The role of the player character is always to answer the "call of duty", whatever it may be.
- Any modern game involving Mario that includes the prefix "Super" is somewhat anachronistic since, outside of the New Super Mario Bros. series, turning from small Mario to "Super Mario" has ceased to be part of the play mechanics.
- The original Super Mario Bros. itself lacked the 2-player co-op mode from the original Mario Bros., which is the reason why the preceding game was titled Mario Bros. in the first place. While Super has a 2-Player mode, it is of the alternating type, which reduces Luigi's role in the game to a mere afterthought (since there's no point of having a separate Player 2 character if both players have to take turn). The Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2 would try to justify Luigi's inclusion in the game by removing the 2-Player mode and making Luigi an alternate character with his own characteristics, while the 2-Player mode in SMB3 allows both players to split the stages among themselves rather than having separate playthroughs for each one.
- Metroid seems to be desperately trying to avoid this:
- By Metroid Fusion, the Metroids have been exterminated by the protagonist, who to justify the game's title is now physically bonded with the last remaining Metroid. Every game since then has been a prequel.
- The latter two thirds of the Metroid Prime trilogy just avoids falling into this. Dark Samus, the main antagonist of 2 and 3, is in fact the eponymous Metroid Prime, bonded with the Phazon Suit after the battle at the end of the first game. It's very easy to miss this, however, as it's never explicitly mentioned anywhere, and the only real hint (seeing Dark Samus' hand emerge from the puddle of Phazon) is only shown after the credits of the first game—IF you've found every last secret in the game.
- Hunters is indeed devoid of Metroids.
- Except for the demo version.
- Another attempted handwave claimed that the titular creatures were named after the Chozo word for a great warrior, meaning the term can be applied to Samus as well.
- The NES version of Capcom's Shoot 'em Up Section Z features numbered sections instead of the alphabetized ones like the original Arcade Game. Thus the final area in the NES version is actually Section 59, rather than Section Z like in the arcade version.
- Quartet was originally a four-player Arcade Game that played like a side-scrolling Gauntlet; a version titled Quartet 2 was released as a conversion kit for two-player cabinets, but it allows each player to select from among the four characters. The Sega Master System version, however, only has two playable characters: Mary and Edgar were kept, but Joe and Lee were removed. The Japanese Mark III version was retitled Double Target to reflect this change, but the overseas release kept the arcade game's original title.
- At no point in Tales Of Monkey Island do any of the characters set foot on Monkey Island, although it is referenced several times. The island also was not featured in Monkey Island 2, although The Curse Of Monkey Island later retconned this.
- Only to be expected when the first game "The Secret of Monkey Island", neither mentioned nor revealed the titular secret. A fact repeatedly lampshaded throughout the series.
- Only one of the Ys games involves the titular Floating Continent.
- Theme Park gets this trope in two directions:
- The original game was Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The title of the sequel, Theme Hospital, made less sense.
- The Theme Park title itself is an Artifact Title. Traditionally, a "theme park" is a distinct style of amusement park, with landscaping, buildings, and attractions that are based on one or more specific or central themes. Over the years the term become interchangeable with the more generic "amusement park." The game uses this definition, as parks in Theme Park are essentially just a generic agglomeration of rides and attractions.
- The Spirit Engine 2 is an In Name Only sequel to the original. It has a completely different setting — the only things connecting it to the original are the battle system and the "choose-your-own-characters" feature, making it a Spiritual Successor.
- The first game in the Dragon Quest series was originally about some warrior on a quest to go slay the Dragonlord, hence the title "Dragon Quest". Future titles in the series would still have you take on quests, but the importance of dragons would further diminish to the point where they have little-to-no importance, only serving to be the typical mook you see around the end of the game.
- Since the second game, the Etrian Odyssey series has had an artifact title. The first game takes place in Etria and the nearby labyrinth. However, the second and third games take place in Lagaard and Armoroad respectively, the second having passing references to the first only if you used a special code.
- Portal 2 was almost this, as the creators originally wanted to focus on a different puzzle aspect as opposed to more Portals, but they eventually kept the Portal puzzles in.
- Interesting case with Beatmania and pop'n music. In the beginning, Beatmania's turntable produced scratches (usually), while the keys corresponded to the notes, sound effects, samples, beeps, spoken words, etc. to be placed into the background music. It was actually fairly similar to how a disc jockey would use "beats" to create a mix. Likewise, Pop 'n Music started out with almost exclusively several variants of pop music, and was intended as a casual, fun, light gaming experience for multiple players. Two types of player, specifically: 1) a boyfriend and girlfriend on a date, and 2) kids. After both franchises took off and became popular, however, branching out into different genres became a necessity, as was making more challenging notecharts (with the bar going higher and higher as players just kept getting better and better). Beatmania has long since done away with hip-hop and R&B, once the backbones of the franchise, while Pop 'n Music has covered everything to Country to Percussive to Opera to Thrash Metal to Eurobeat, and every ancient traditional Japanese music style ever.
- Castlevania: Circle of the Moon and Dawn of Sorrow are set in castles alright - just not Dracula's castle (which is referred to sometimes as Castlevania). Circle Of The Moon is set in Camilla's castle, while Dawn of Sorrow is set in the castle owned by Celia Fortner's cult. The Dawn of Sorrow castle is apparently an "exact replica", but this attempt to smooth out what is otherwise a minor piece of trivia creates serious confusion as the castle is the Trope Namer for Chaos Architecture, making any "replica" impossible (unless it's an "exact replica" in that it mimics the castle's nature; either way, it's a bit confusing).
- Subverted with God Of War. While the titular Ares does die in the first game, one must remember that Kratos has taken up his position afterwards, so the games are still about the God of War.
- This is somewhat debatable since Kratos loses his godly powers in the beginning of God of War II and doesn't regain them in either that game or the sequel. God of War: Chains Of Olympus, is set before the first game and doesn't even feature Ares. The only game featuring Kratos as the God of War from start to finish is God of War: Ghost of Sparta.
- Halo:
- Save for a very brief glimpse in the ending cutscene, the Halo Reach campaign doesn't a contain a Ring World Planet, the titular "Halos" which the plot of the first three games revolve around. One does, however, show up prodominantly in some multiplayer maps (purely as Fanservice according to Word Of God).
- Halo 3 ODST also does not feature the titular ring. The number is somewhat misleading as well, as the game takes place during the events of Halo 2. It is, however, running on Halo 3's engine.
- Halo Wars also does not feature any of the the aforementioned rings.
- Halo 4 never sees the Master Chief set foot on a Halo installation (though he can *see* one from an orbiting space station at one point). However, the plot is focused on a new kind of artificial planet, a Shield World called Requiem.
- The IL 2 Sturmovik series was so named because it began as a detailed simulation of that one plane. As of the latest revision, the Ilyushin Il-2 is still present, but so are 228 other planes, not counting those added by modders.
- The sequel takes place during the Battle of Britain but still references the original with its title Cliffs of Dover: Il-2 Sturmovik, despite the fact that the titular plane hadn't even had its first flight at that time. This was caused by Executive Meddling wanting to emphasise the connection between the original game and Cliffs of Dover.
- The Super Smash Bros. trilogy now features at least four female characters in the main cast.
- Samus was a main character in the original, and a girl, so the name wasn't 100% accurate to begin with.
- An in-game example: Several of the Ghost characters in Tekken 6 that use Armor King have customised him to not wear armor.
- Nintendo's Miis got their name as a pun on "Me" and "Wii", the console on which they made their debut. Half of that pun now makes little sense if you use them on the 3DS.
- Most unofficial fan sequels to the popular NES game Duck Hunt actually do not involve shooting any ducks at all, since there aren't any there - you now instead shoot dogs! Probably for the better.
- Mega Man Zero features a protagonist named Zero, not Mega Man. Ironically, the manga adaptation of MMZ made this mistake about Zero, among many other errors/deviations. It was so notable that, years later, Zero's ending in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 specifically made a point of poking fun at this.
- beatmania IIDX was originally meant to be titled simply "beatmania II", with a bigger and better "deluxe" version of the arcade cabinet available as "beatmania II DX". The latter proved to be much, MUCH more popular and quickly became the norm, so Konami stopped production of the non-deluxe cabinets. Since the logo had the "II" and "DX" close together, the game became known as "beatmania IIDX" and Konami decided "Sure, Why Not?"
- The first mission of Tom Clancy's HAWX is the retirement flight of the eponymous squadron; for the rest of the first half of the game, you're a part of the PMC Artemis' "Reaper Flight". Zig-zagged later on: after Artemis betrays the United States and the player squadron defects, they return to active service as HAWX flight.
- In Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon , Luigi is busting ghosts in several different places, none of which are his, and only two of them are mansions.
- Super Sentai Battle Dice O originally represented the strength of your characters' attacks by rolling dice. After it was updated to Dice-O Deluxe to go along with Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, this was changed to a spinning wheel, yet the title was kept. There is, in fact, *one* rolling die that remains in the game (one of the special move cards replicates the default ground finishing move from the original Dice-O, in which your team fired a giant die at the opponents) but it isn't central to the gameplay anymore.
- While the sequel Riven and odd-game-out Uru: Ages Beyond Myst avoided this, the titular island of Myst was not seen in Myst III: Exile or Myst IV: Revelation.
- The Saints Row game have fallen to this - although the eponymous Row was still there in the 2nd game, it was the only territory you couldn't retake. Saints Row The Third doesn't even take place in the same city anymore.
- The Dark Forces Saga features something of a subversion: the Dark Forces title is a reference to the first game's Dark Trooper project. Said project plays no part in the sequel, Jedi Knight, which would render it this trope... if not for the connotations that the term "Dark Force" carries in the Star Wars universe.
- The title of Guild Wars actually refers to a series of wars which took place before the events of the original game. By the time the player character comes along, they have ended. They make sense in the context of the game since players can form guilds and engage in matched combat against other guilds, but the title is a hangover from the early days of its development when this aspect of the game was the most important. It is even more an example of this when you consider the upcoming sequel, Guild Wars 2 is set 250 years after the original game, and guild versus guild combat is not a feature that will be included, at least when the game launches.
- The first Alundra game is centered around the titular character, but he doesn't appear or gets mentioned in the sequel.
- The Legend Of Zelda series can sometimes dabble into this trope, as there are a games where Zelda has little to no role in the story. However, she is still very much a central character to the series overall.
- While Zelda herself doesn't physically appear in a select few games, she still plays some sort of role overall due to Skyward Sword revealing that Zelda is actually the goddess Hylia reborn in human form. This explains Zelda's powers throughout the series and why nearly every evil character kidnaps her.
- While Valkyrie Profile Covenant Of The Plume does have a Valkyrie as a driving force of the plot, she's a background character at best, only showing up as a boss fight. All the playable characters and many of the movers and shakers in the plot are actually mortals. This is lampshaded in the Brutal Bonus Level when Freya, another Valkyrie with the minimal role of appearing in side scenes when you change plot paths and dispensing the Non Standard Game Over appears as a Bonus Boss. Wylfred asks what she's doing there, since he hasn't used the Destiny Plume enough to get her attention. Freya points out the game's not called "Mortal Profile" and she intends to off him and take his place as main character.
- The word "Version" in each of the main Pokémon games. Originally, it referred to differently-colored game paks, and until Yellow came out, Red and Blue (or Red and Green in Japan) were just called "Pokemon", rather than actually being part of the title of each version of each game (minus "Version"). Diamond and Pearl were the first pair of games not to have color-coded cards, and each game's version name from there on referred only to the cover art.
- Two Worlds: Before the game was even released, in fact. The website for the original game has an outdated synopsis that challenges you to choose which of the Two Worlds you will save. This has nothing to do with the released game or its sequel.
Webcomics
Web Original
- The Bronyism Facebook page. It used to be a hub for loyal fans of the show until a team of Trolls hijacked it from the unsuspecting admins on December 14, 2011 and turned the place upside-down, replacing the ponies with obscure memes, bizarre stories and images, off-the-wall religious and political debates, odd Toilet Humor, and the like.
- Played for Laughs in Girl-Chan in Paradise by Egoraptor, which BARELY features its eponymous character. Even when the characters are standing in a group shot, don't expect to see her anywhere in sight. In the ending theme sequence, she is the last of the floating head lineup to appear. Yusuke even goes so far as to say implicitly that she is worthless, and to tell her to shut up when she gives her one line for the entire episode. Really all she does is flash a little boobage here and there.
- The name "lonelygirl15" made a lot more sense when it was a girl in her bedroom talking to a webcam.
- Especially after they killed off the title character.
- Look a Vlog isn't a vlog at all anymore.
- In Sockbaby Part 3, Sockbaby's plot was wrapped up, and he left for heaven or another universe or something. He doesn't appear at all in Sockb4by, which just focuses on the further adventures of Ronnie and Burger.
- Other than being her TGWTG handle, have you ever heard The Nostalgia Chick being called her username of "The Dudette"? Even the url on the website was changed to "Team N Chick".
- The title of The Joker Blogs originally referred to The Joker's treatment tapes at Arkham Asylum being put up on YouTube (something the Joker planned to occur) in a 'blog' format, occasionally featuring updates with tasks for the 'goons' (fans) to do. As of the end of the First Season (around the start of the "Find Patient 4479" arc words), this is no longer the case since the episodes afterwards are in less of a 'blog' format and focus more on the plot.
- The Barney Bunch was originally made when Barney hate was still at large, but soon coming to an end. Today, most Barney Bunch videos feature Drew Pickles as the main character instead.
- The first Demotivational Posters were cynical parodies of motivational posters, bearing messages about your inevitable failure. Following Memetic Mutation the same style of image is now used essentially as a one-man caption contest, keeping the name but rarely trying to demotivate.
- Marble Hornets. The eponymous student film arc has been over since about entry #20.
- It gained prominence again in roughly entry #53, but considering where the plot has gone, this is likely a temporary thing.
- The International Broadway Database can't exactly be international if Broadway is only in one place. But it was probably titled this to imitate imdb.
- Red vs. Blue hasn't had the Red and Blue characters as actual enemies for a while, although most of the humor comes from their failed attempts to kill each other.
- Most of the characters on the Red and Blue teams were never either strictly red or blue anyway—Tucker is teal, Simmons is maroon, Grif is
yellow orange, Tex is black, Lopez is brown, and Donut is pink "lightish-red". Since Season 3 or so, the plot has had virtually nothing to do with Reds versus Blues (although it's still mentioned, and the Red vs. Blue "war" is technically an important piece of the story, even if the main characters no longer participate in it), instead being about a bunch of people with armor colors nowhere near red or blue (all of the Freelancers, for example).
- Also, the original subtitle (Blood Gulch Chronicles) is rather inappropriate for the large amounts of time they spend away from Blood Gulch, particularly in Season 4.
- Averted later when they changed the subtitle when they permanently left Blood Gulch after Season 5.
- Rooster Teeth's Achievement Horse series hasn't involved any actual games of Horse in a long time, the competitors usually opting to play shorter games of Pig.
- Master Chief Sucks at Ordering stops being about Master Chief sucking at ordering things after the third episode. However, the series (and its episode titles) continue to reference the fact that Master Chief sucks at doing things. The reason the show wasn't simply called "Master Chief Sucks" to avoid this problem was presumably because another series already used that name; said series would then be permanently renamed to Arby 'n' the Chief.
- That Guy With The Glasses started out as a website where internet comedian/reviewer Doug Walker uploaded all of his videos before other content-creators started contributing to the site.
- His main series The Nostalgia Critic originally focused on "nostalgic" movies and television shows from the 1980s and the 1990s (hence the title). Since the 2013 revival of the series, the date limit has been removed and the show has become more of a general review show, though still with a bent on relatively "older" films up to at least the mid-2000s.
- Text riff series I Can't Believe It's Not AVGN! started out with bad AVGN clones (notably The Irate Gamer, Game Dude and NC 17 Productions) but has expanded to just bad video game reviews in general. The title stayed.
- The Happy Video Game Nerd was originally named as such as he was a parody/inversion of The Angry Video Game Nerd, reviewing underrated retro games with a positive tone if overenthusiastic tone. Nowadays, he also includes modern games and more mainstream titles, and has done away with the "happy" in favor of more natural and objective tone.
- How It Should Have Ended started off showing parody alternate endings of movies. The focus has since expanded to more general movie parodies, featuring scenes from much earlier in the movie and sometimes not even touching the ending at all.
- Some people choose usernames that reference a series, then later on disown the series, especially in fandoms with poor reputations.
- David Mitchell's Soapbox was originally a pun on the fact that it was sponsored by a brand of men's cosmetics. They withdrew their sponsorship at the start of the third series, but the title remained.
- For a more general example, football forums have had Adaptation Expansion and football is only part of their schtick/USP; it still remains, probably due to the Grandfather Clause, but the term is an otherwise artifact title in general.
- Although anyone can still upload documents, WikiLeaks stopped allowing people to edit them afterwards a long time ago, so it's no longer truly a wiki.
- It He Software. It was originally created to showcase the author's software and Game Mods. It's now known mostly for its anti-walkthroughs.
- Some blogs on SB Nation, most notably the Toronto Maple Leafs' Pension Plan Puppets - it referenced how the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan owned most of the team's parent company, but they have since sold their share. One at least confesses the nostalgia outfront: the Washington Wizards one references the team's previous name, Bullets Forever.
- Barely Political is actually an inversion. Back when it became popular in 2007, it made nothing but political videos in time for the 2008 election season. Now, six years later, it's become a Meaningful Name, as most of its videos are Key of Awesome parody videos.
- The "ot" part of Let's Player Cicabeot1's channel name originally stood for "On Tour". As in Guitar Hero: On Tour. He doesn't even do Guitar Hero videos as often anymore, let alone the On Tour spinoff.
- Stupid Mario Bros was originally a nonsensical comedy with no real plot. It was mostly just characters from Nintendo games in the real world while engaging in slice-of-life activities. When they decided to add more elaborate story arcs, the show became a lot more dramatic and less "stupid".
Western Animation
Real Life—Places
- Anything that hangs around for long enough with the word "new" in its name (and no original or older version to differentiate itself from) is set for a date with this trope.
- Novgorod (=New Town) in Russia, now one of the oldest cities there.
- The New Forest in England, created by William the Conqueror in 1079.
- The Pont Neuf (=New Bridge), oldest bridge in Paris.
- New College, Oxford, is one of the oldest member of the university.
- The Old-New Synagogue, the oldest in Prague (it dates to the 13th century). Formerly known as New Synagogue, to distinguish it from the Old Synagogue (11/12th century). In the 16th century the New Synagogue was built, and the other came to be called Old-New. (Neither the New Synagogue nor the Old one exist any more.) A Jewish legend gives a different origin of the name - as the story goes, an angel brought stones from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem to serve as a foundation of the building, under a condition (Hebrew: al tenai, subsequently corrupted to alt-neu, German for "old-new") that they must be returned when the temple is rebuilt.
- The California golden bear (Ursus arctos californicus) has been associated with the state of California since the short-lived Bear Flag Republic of 1846, and was placed on the official state flag in 1911, where it remains today. The sports teams of the University of California at Berkeley (the main campus of the University of California system) have been called the Golden Bears since 1895. The California golden bear went extinct in 1922.
- The US city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin is often referred to by the nicknames "Brew City" or "The Brew" as it gained notoriety in the early 20th century as the headquarters of four of the countries' largest breweries. Nowadays, its economy is centered around health care and only one large brewery (Miller) still operates in the city, but is headquartered in Chicago.
- Hunstanton, Norfolk has a similar problem; the construction known as the Hundred Steps (leading from the Esplanade Gardens down to the beach at the bottom of the cliffs) hasn't had a hundred steps since the main promenade was extended to meet the steps about two-thirds of the way down.
- Somewhere in France, there is a road called the "seventeen turns", but at least two of them were later removed.
- There is a church in Athens, Georgia known as Prince Avenue Baptist Church. It is located on Ruth Jackson Road, which is across town from Prince Avenue.
- The town of Sevenoaks in England varies between accurate and artifact at different times. It is currently an artifact, with nine oaks on the site, but there have been as few as one in the past.
- The House of Blues, while still hosting the occasional soul or jazz act, is seen as a must-hit venue for any band of any genre touring the US.
- Parodied by The Onion: "House of Blues actually House of Whites".
- This might be seen as a live-venue version of Network Decay.
- Orange County, California, was so named because of the large amounts of orange groves that once grew there, and those orange groves no longer exist. A few abandoned Sunkist factories survived for a while but they, too, were eventually torn down.
- When Orange County was formed, there was already a town named "Orange" there. It's apparently debatable though whether the county was named after the town, or whether the county was named after the fruit and the town name was a coincidence. (The town itself was named after Orange County, Virginia).
- It is widely believed that Orange County, New York (home of the eponymous Choppers) had taken its name from the Dutch royal family, which hasn't held any kind of authority there since the late 17th century.
- The United States of America, under international law, is a state, and the "states" are really, essentially, provinces. The name comes from when the U.S. was still thought to be a confederation of sovereign states that acted more or less like independent nations under a more powerful and local UN, hence all the early references to "this Union" or "Union of States". This conception more or less died out after the Civil War, when "nation" started cropping up (though secession's still theoretically permissible, so long as the other "states" agree).
- The name's meaning began to fall apart a mere 12 years into the United States' existence, when the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the US Constitution. This reduced some of the powers available to state governments and greatly increased the power of the national government. Which has from then on been the "federal" government, denoting that it shares power with the states instead of merely having what the states delegate to it.
- Really it fell apart when the Articles of Confederation themselves were ratified in 1781, just five years into the United States' existence. That document, while a far weaker central government than the Constitution that replaced it, did reserve certain powers—declaring war, making treaties, sending and receiving ambassadors, enforcing maritime laws in U.S. territorial waters, and coining/printing money. No truly independent state would cede those powers to another entity.
- Scenic 17 Mile Drive in Monterey, California is no longer 17 miles long. It's just under 10, while the other portions of the road have been absorbed by the surrounding town and are not considered part of the scenic highway anymore.
- A large number of settlements and nations across the world have often lost the things or characteristics they were named after.
- "America" is most commonly used to refer to the United States, although it originally meant all of the Americas (North and South). Many Latin Americans dislike this usage for obvious reasons.
- Crystal Palace, South London takes its name from the Crystal Palace, which was re-sited there in 1854. Originally erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the re-sited Palace was the most prominent landmark for miles around, and gave its name to the area (formerly Sydenham Hill) and most of the local amenities. It isn’t there now, though: it was destroyed by a fire in 1936.
- Street names are often artifacts of times past:
- Many towns across the US will continue to have a "Railroad Street" (or "Station Road" in the UK) long after the corresponding railroad track has been dug up, a "Church Street" that no longer has a church on it, a "School Street" that no longer has a school on it, et cetera.
- Some shopping mall developers name the mall access roads after the department stores they're near. Sometimes, these access roads keep the same name even if the department store doesn't (for instance, at least two malls in Michigan have access roads named for Hudson's, when in both cases, the store in question is now Macy's).
- Hills Plaza in State College, PA no longer has Hills.
- In Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, the Charlottetown Mall has an access road named Towers Private Road, for the now-defunct Towers chain, which was sold to Zellers in 1990, and will become a location of Target in 2013.
- In Danville, PA, there's a Sheraton Rd. near the Interstate. But the hotel the road leads to is now a Days Inn. Similarly, in Falls Church, VA, the hotel to be found on Ramada Rd. is now a Westin.
- In Manassas Park, VA, the fast food place on Hardees Drive is now a Roy Rogers.
- Richmond, British Columbia has a street known as Sweden Way, formerly home to a store of Swedish chain IKEA which relocated to an adjacent lot in 2012.
- In Reston, Virginia, the massive Reston Town Center project required considerable construction resources, and a temporary road was built to facilitate access for construction vehicles. Over two decades later, a number of businesses and residences have Temporary Road as their (permanent) address.
- Wall Street originally went along an actual wall. The wall is long since gone, but the name stuck.
- Horseferry Road, Westminster, best known for its magistrates court, did once lead directly to the horse ferry crossing the Thames to Lambeth Palace. It now leads to Lambeth Bridge, which replaced the ferry in 1862.
- In Baltimore, Maryland, "North Avenue" was so named as it was once the northern border of the city. It is currently nowhere near the city borders.
- On the other hand, one can argue that Gay Street in lower Manhattan has had its name become more appropriate as changing times led to a vibrant gay culture in the surrounding neighborhood, though the name actually originated, apparently, from the name of an 18th or 19th century property owner.
- The US-23 Drive-In in Flint, Michigan had an accurate name for only six years: the road in front of it was US-23, until the highway was re-routed to a freeway in 1958. It was also right next to a "23 Market" (now a Kroger), which once had several other locations throughout Flint — none of which were located on US-23 or a past alignment thereof.
- Speaking of highway re-routings, it's not uncommon for the old alignment of a state or national highway to be renamed "Old [highway number]". However, in some cases, the "new" highway is later renumbered, but the "old" one still carries the old number. For instance, there are several pieces of "Old M-11" throughout western Michigan; M-11 was re-routed several times before it was renumbered US-31 in 1926, and the number M-11 was used elsewhere.
- Vermont's Route 22A is a continuation of New York's Route 22A, which splits off from that state's long Route 22 near the Vermont state line. Vermont itself has no Route 22.
- Madison Square Garden in New York City was orginally located around Madison Square, but has had two locations away from it since 1925 (the current dating to 1968).
- Redding, California has North, South, East, and West streets, which were named as such because those were the geographic borders of the town. Now they are in the middle of the western half of the city.
- Redding also has the Lorenz Hotel, which is actually a business center with some apartments, as well.
- Also, Redding is the county seat of Shasta County. The Shasta Native American tribe has been officially considered completely wiped out by the federal government.
- Redding's Shasta High School yearbook is named the Daisy, even though that has not been their mascot for about a century (it's the Wolves).
- Many cities that have undergone amalgamations contain neighbourhoods or districts whose names no longer apply. For instance, in Toronto the term "East End" does not refer to Scarborough or part thereof, but to the east end of the pre-1998 city.
- Oklahoma City, OK, has several such neighborhoods. Capitol Hill is, in fact, miles from the State Capitol complex, and is instead the former main street of a city that was annexed long ago (it's also no longer a hill, if it ever was). Stockyards City and Putnam City are not cities but neighborhoods of OKC. Midtown and Uptown are much closer to Downtown than they are to the actual outer boundaries of the city, which has expanded greatly since those names were given. Belle Isle hasn't been an island since the lake it was in was drained over half a century ago to make room for a new highway. Additionally, Automobile Alley and Film Row no longer have any car dealerships or film exchanges, respectively. The name "Deep Deuce" probably no longer applies, either. There are a lot of bricks in Bricktown, though.
- University buildings may fall into this trope over time. For instance, the Old Horticulture Building at Michigan State University (affectionately termed "Old Whore" by students) houses... the Department of Romance and Classical Studies (that's "Romance" as in "Romance languages"). Yes. It used to house the Horticulture department; no longer. Horticulture today is housed in the Plant and Soil Science Building, which actually is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- Columbia University's Low Memorial Library (the big domed building in the middle of campus that's a National Historic Landmark) is currently the administration offices. It hasn't been the campus's main library building since Butler Library across the quad was built in the 1930s. Yet Low still has "The Library of Columbia University" engraved across its frieze.
- The city of College Station, Texas, was named for the railroad station, College Station, which was named because it served Texas A&M College. Texas A&M College long ago became Texas A&M University, and the railroad station named for it long ago was bulldozed to make way for a multi-lane road.
- In fact, the "A&M" in Texas A&M is an artifact. The name used to be short for "Agricultural and Mechanical", back when it was primarily an Ag school. Now that the school's subjects have expanded to include all manner of subjects, the "A&M" isn't short for anything in particular, and is kept out of tradition.
- Both Glacier National Park and Glacier Bay National Park could lose most of their glaciers if climate change continued unchecked.
- In the United States, many railroad stations are called Union Station. These originally where used by trains from multiple railroads and joint owned by the railroads served. Today, most of these stations are owned by the city in which they reside, and are mainly served by Amtrak. Still the name has stuck.
- In many towns in Canada and Australia, you can find bars called hotels. Few of them still rent rooms.
- One Tree Hill (Maungakiekie) in Auckland, New Zealand, the namesake for a U2 song and a teen drama series, no longer has a tree. The single radiata pine on its summit was felled in 2001 after been attacked by a Maori activist with a chainsaw, and attempts to plant a replacement tree have met legal resistance.
- There are a number of place names that made sense only before they were developed:
- St. John's Wood in London. Has trees still, but it's not a forest anymore.
- The Pastures neighborhood of Albany, New York, was once the communal pasture for the city when it was within a stockade that surrounded the present downtown. It still has a surprising amount of open space, but you probably wouldn't want to annoy the many residents by grazing animals there.
- Boston's Back Bay has long since been drained and developed.
- New Lots in Brooklyn, New York, has a lot of buildings now.
- Las Vegas translates as "The Meadows".
- A number of airport codes reflect now-abandoned names.
- "ORD" for Chicago's O'Hare airport, probably the best known example of this, dates to when the Windy City's main airport was still known as "Orchard Field."
- Stewart International Airport, which serves Newburgh, N.Y., was originally Stewart Field—hence it still has the code "SWF."
- Pittsburgh, PA is widely known as "Steel City" and has a football team called the Steelers, but the actual steel industry it thrived upon collapsed after The Eighties. It is better known now for medicine and glassworks.
- India takes its name from the Indus River, a river which flows through Pakistan.
- Brazil is named after a certain tree called "Pau-Brasil" (Brazil Wood), which was very abundant during the time of the country's colonization (circa 1500-1600). This tree is practically extinct today.
- The "Pacific" in Pacific Northwest is an artifact of a time when it needed to be distinguished from the "Northwest", which is today called the Upper Midwest, but was the "Northwest" in the early 19th century since it was the northwestern corner of the U.S. (Northwestern University's name is thus an artifact title as well). Nobody looking at a map of the U.S. today would consider anything but the Pacific Northwest to be the Northwest.
- Nearby the Pacific Northwest is the Canadian province of British Columbia. Britain hasn't exercised direct authority over the territory in at least three-quarters of a century, hasn't been able to exercise any authority over it since 1986, and while it is true that the Canadian and British Columbian head of state is HM The Queen, she holds that title separately independently (that is to say, it "just so happens" that the Queen of British Columbia is the same person as the Queen of the United Kingdom). In other words: British Columbia isn't British anymore.
- No actual sheep have grazed in the area of New York's Central Park called "Sheep Meadow" since the 1930s, when they were removed out of fear that people made desperate by the Depression would kidnap and eat them.
- And Pearl Harbor has long been inhospitable to the pearl-bearing oysters it was once rich in.
- Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., are still collectively referred to as the Tarrytowns, despite residents of the latter having voted in 1996 to change the name from North Tarrytown to capitalize on the tourist business.
- Just south of Buffalo, Lackawanna, N.Y., is an artifact name in several ways.
- Why is a town in Western New York named for a river and valley two hundred miles to the east in Pennsylvania? Well, in the early 1900s, Buffalo's business elite convinced the Lackawanna Steel Company to move its production west from Scranton, where workers were getting increasingly militant. They set up shop not in the city but just south of it, in the town of West Seneca, where there was less infrastructure and thus they'd pay less in property taxes.//In 1923 the Lackawanna sold out to another Pennsylvania-based steel company, Bethlehem. It kept the name, and later in the decade, with its own workers frequently going on strike, it encouraged the founding of the city of Lackawanna, so that a proper police force could be raised to deal with the strikers.//Eventually Bethlehem renamed the plant for itself. The city's name stayed. Then in 1982 it closed up shop. So, Lackawanna is named after a company that no longer exists which no longer makes its product in the city.
Real Life—Companies
- It is common for a new owner of an established restaurant to keep the name the previous owner(s) in order to keep the established clientele and all the good reputation built. This will often lead to names which imply one style of cuisine and offer a different.
- Among Hawaiian companies:
- LikeLike Drive Inn, for many years now neither near Likelike Avenue nor a drive in.
- KamBowl Haircuts, formerly in the Kamehameha Shopping Center Bowling Alley, but now in a nameless strip mall near Dillingham Avenue after the demolition of said bowling alley.
- Wisteria Vista condominiums on South King Street, formerly overlooking the Wisteria Restaurant (therefore offering a Wisteria Vista). Now not so much, as the Wisteria was torn down and replaced with an ordinary 7-11 (see below).
- Kapiolani Community College, also decades in its spot near Diamond Head instead of its former location on Kapiolani Avenue.
- The famous (and now gone forever) New York music venue CBGB stood for "Country, Blue Grass, and Blues", initially specializing on those aforementioned types of music (along with "Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers"). Soon, CBGB, instead of being a home for old-time folk music, went down in history as an important landmark for the American punk/New Wave scene, housing bands such as The Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads.
- Canadian Tire started as an auto parts store in Toronto in 1922, hence the "Tire". It's now a much more diversified hardware store, although most Canadian Tire stores have extensive automotive departments, service garages and gas stations.
- Similarly with London Drugs, originally a small drugstore in Vancouver, now a nationwide chain of fairly diverse retail stores, though with some emphasis on the sorts of things you expect from the "Drugs" part of the name.
- The convenience store chain 7-Eleven was named after its hours of operation. Now most stores are open 24-7. Its parent company was until 2005 known as the Southland Ice Company, after its original business model of block-ice delivery in Texas in the years before most Americans owned refrigerators.
- The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, or A&P. A long-standing grocery chain, they quickly went on to sell more than just tea. Yet, when they announced that they were having financial problems in 2010, at least one news website ran a headline saying "Tea company to close 25 stores."
- Any product or store named after a price expressed in an inflatory currency will be this if the name isn't changed.
- Dollar stores, at least in the United States. Almost all of them now sell items that are much more expensive than $1.00 (or x for $1.00). Many of the stores call themselves 'Dollar (and up)' stores now, the 'and up' part being in tiny print. Which probably isn't the great advertising idea (everything we sell is more expensive than a dollar!), but the public is so used to seeing the dollar part and equating it with the inverse they're used to...
- In Hungary the "Twinner 88" chewing gum initally cost 88 forints. There were also shops that "sell everything for 100 forints", which was later changed to "we sell (almost) everything for 100 forints", then only the name of the shop was "100 forint shop" but the prices were higher. Now it is re-branded to "One Euro Market" - in a country that doesn't use the euro.
- American fast-food chain Carl's Jr. was so named because its first location was supposed to be the "junior" (i.e. smaller accompaniment) of a now long-gone barbeque chain called Carl's.
- Motel chain Best Western was named because most of their properties were west of the Mississippi and considered to be the "best". They tried using "Best Eastern" once they hit the other side of the river, but it didn't stick.
- YMCA stands for Young Men's Christian Association, and in those days, it was exactly what it said on the tin (It was created for fun as an alternative to various city vices and, due to period swimsuits not being compatible with pool technology of the time, was male only). But nowadays, it's a place where even old Hindu women can go and have fun. (Plus its notoriety as a place where gay men had...uh...fun, which inspired the Village People song). It is still an association, though.
- The organization has changed its name to 'The Y', because of the general confusion as to what YMCA was supposed to stand for. One can only wonder what will happen when people forget that the Y stands for YMCA...
- There have also been YWCAs (Young Women's Christian Associations) and there used to be at least one YWHA (Young Women's Hebrew Association) in Philadelphia.
- AOL, despite being short for America Online, now operates in countries outside the United States, many of which are not in North or South America.
- 20th Century Fox. The name originally came about from a merger between 20th Century Pictures and Fox Film Corporation in 1935, and at the Turn of the Millennium they made a statement saying they wouldn't update the company name (Futurama's Logo Joke notwithstanding).
- The Logo in Futurama says 30th Century Fox - It's a century behind in-canon as well.
- The Phone House still goes by its its original name of The Carphone Warehouse in the UK and Ireland.
- In Baltimore, there is a place called the "Belair Road Supply Company". It started as a supply company on Belair Road. However, it has since moved to Pulaski Highway.
- There's a corporation called Gyrodyne which once manufactured helicopters for the US Navy. By 1975 the military contracts dried up and the company reinvented itself as a real estate investment trust. For 35 years it has had nothing to do with aviation or engineering of any kind, yet no-one ever bothered to change the company's name.
- Oxfam International is a multinational aid confederation with member organisations in 14 countries. Its name comes from the now obsolete telegraph address of the original organisation: the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, founded in Oxford, UK in 1942 to lobby for a relaxation of the Allied blockade of Axis-occupied Greece to allow food relief.
- Dunkin' Donuts. Sure, they still serve donuts and coffee, like they always have, but they never seem to even bother to promote the tens of varieties of donuts they serve. Their current slogan is "America Runs On Dunkin'", an emphasis on coffee, compared to this commercial from the 1980s, where there was an emphasis on donuts. They even serve, including but not limited to, flatbread sandwiches, bagels, bagel twists, pepperoni-stuffed breadsticks, breakfast sandwiches (served on croissants, bagels, English muffins, and biscuits), chicken salad sandwiches, hash browns, iced beverages, and a coffee menu that's mutated to all sorts of coffee-based drinks.
- Likewise, Canadian chain Tim Hortons dropped "Donuts" from their name entirely once they started to sell more than coffee and donuts.
- Inverted by Netflix: The service's name was created during its initial conception as a streaming service (which was shelved for technology reasons). As a result of improving technology, the name became accurate when the service's streaming content eclipsed its mail order content.
- GEICO stands for Government Employee Insurance Company, and as the name suggests, only sold insurance to government employees. (The assumption at the time was that government employees would tend to be better drivers.) It has since expanded well-beyond the point that its name makes any sense.
- There's also a fair amount of credit unions originally founded for public employees of a particular agency that are now open to anyone. Many of them still don't fall completely under an Artifact Title by virtue of the fact that they're still operated by the parent company, so the name is still appropriate.
- The iTunes Store, while originally a store for music, now also sells ebooks, movies and iPhone apps.
- New York's famous Second Avenue Deli, now located on 33rd Street and 3rd Avenue, with a second location on 1st Ave. and 75th St.
- Nokia Corporation got its name because it had a mill in the town of Nokia, Finland, back when it used to manufacture paper rather than communication technology. Nowadays it has its headquarters in Espoo, Finland, and the only connection it has to its old home town is the name.
- AT&T stands for American Telephone and Telegraph. While they could probably still handle it if they had to, telegraphy went out of use a long time ago.
- Gateway, the former computer company, was originally founded as Gateway 2000 to make and sell peripherals, such as network gateways, in the mid-1980s. The plan was always to start making their own computers, and by the early 1990s that was their core business. In 1998 the "2000" was dropped, averting that part of the trope. Acer, which has owned Gateway since the mid-2000s, will soon be retiring the name completely.
- Facebook: A "facebook" is something that has historically been distributed to American college freshmen, with pictures of the entire class and, perhaps, some brief information. Sort of like a high school yearbook inverted, even with the same lame pictures. This name for the network reflected its original limitation to alumni of various colleges and universities — a restriction that, when dropped, helped the company overtake MySpace and become the dominant social network.
- The Vassarette brand of lingerie takes its name from the Vassar-Swiss Underwear Company of Chicago, which made both men's and women's underwear. In the mid-20th century the brand name for the latter was given a feminine ending to distinguish it. It was more successful and the company spun it off several years later. The original Vassar brand stopped being produced in the late 1960s.
- Pizza chain Little Caesars has an artifact slogan of "Pizza! Pizza!", referencing the fact that in the early days, Little Caesars sold two pizzas for what competitors charged for only one. While this pricing is no longer the case (although $5 for a "Hot & Ready" pizza is still a pretty good deal), "Pizza! Pizza!" and many other variations thereof are still prominent in advertising.
- Glacier Media, a publisher of various newspapers and magazines in Western Canada, gets their name from having started out as a bottled water company (a business they've been out of for years).
- Motel 6 got its name because its original rate was $6 a night. Costs have since gone up over the years both due to inflation and to the increase of amenities such as coin-operated black-and-white TVs being replaced with free color TVs.
- The same is true of Super 8 Motels, which originally charged $8.88 per room.
- The Five Guys burger chain has lot more employees than that. And quite a few women, too.
- Chex cereal's name and shape reflected the checkerboard logo of its former owner Ralston-Purina (yes, the pet food company used to make cereal, too). The cereal has since been sold to General Mills in 1997, three years after the Ralston portion was spun off into Ralcorp.
- Knott's Berry Farm started off with the Knott family selling berries, pies, and berry preserves beside the farm. Eventually, a fried chicken restaurant was created, and grew so much in popularity that a ghost town and various other attractions were built to entertain guests as they waited for a table. Over time, the attractions grew so much that the Knotts began charging admission, and the attractions would eventually overtake the restaurant and farm itself.
- Supermarket chain ASDA was originally ASsociated DAiries - Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- Discount clothing store Filene's Basement got its name because the first one was opened in the basement of Filene's department store flagship in Boston. The flagship closed in 2006 when Filene's parent company was bought out by Macy's, since it was across from an existing Macy's store. Filene's Basement existed a good five years after the demise of Filene's.
- Similarly, Value City Furniture was once, as its name indicates, a furniture spinoff of discount chain Value City. Value City Furniture was spun off into its own company in 2002, and Value City ended up going out of business in 2008. (Ohio State University's Value City Arena is sponsored by Value City Furniture).
- The United Knitting Machine Corporation was once a large American producer of knitting machines until the late 1970's when it bid and won a subcontract to produce a set of electric railcar pantographs for General Electric. In the years since as the domestic textile industry proceeded to fall off a cliff, UKM took on more and more rail related manufacturing contracts until it completely abandoned knitting machines, but the company nevertheless kept its old name.
- For some reason, "90s Nails" is a common name for nail salons (particularly in shopping malls), despite the 90s being long gone.
- The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway served more than just those three cities, and was the main line from Chicago to Los Angeles. As time went on, management began to refer to the railway as just "Santa Fe." Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Railroad covered much of the northeastern USA.
- The New York and Harlem Railroad has a fascinating history as an artifact title. When established in 1831, its goal was indeed to provide rail service between what we know today as Lower Manhattan and a village about ten miles to the north called Harlem. Six years later it had connected them. By 1842, when it went into the Bronx, the name was no longer accurate.
- In 1864, it became part of the New York Central Railroad. By that point it went all the way up to the Berkshires, where it connected to the main line of the Boston and Albany Railroad. The section of Putnam and Dutchess counties along the Connecticut state line is still sometimes referred to as the Harlem Valley because of the railroad that served it. The Central called it the Harlem Valley line.
- The Central itself met its demise in the early 1970s. But Conrail, and today Metro-North, still designate the commuter rail service along its old route, all the way to Wassaic, NY, as the Harlem Line (confusing to younger riders at first as, while its first stop north of Grand Central is indeed at 125th Street in Harlem, it shares that with the other two Metro-North lines out of the city.
- U.S. Gold started out as a British publisher of American-developed games, but they soon branched out to ports of Arcade Games by Japanese companies such as Namco and Capcom, and eventually branched out to publishing original games from European developers such as Core Design and Delphine Software International.
- The French video game company Loriciel was named after the Oric 1 & Oric Atmos computers its earliest games were created for, but which became obsolete long before the company folded.
- Dungeons & Dragons maker TSR's initials officially don't mean anything now, but originally stood for Tactical Studies Rules, a name which made sense when they were just doing tabletop wargaming but less so when the fantasy role-playing game developed as an offshoot became the company's cash cow.
Real Life—Computing
- Freecell in versions of Windows starting with Vista has an artifact icon — originally, a chest-up shot of the King of Hearts was situated between the two sets of card slots at the top, and would face whichever set a card had most recently been added to (or moused over). He was nixed when Vista overhauled the look of all its games, but the icon remains. The king is dead; long live the king?
- In another Windows example, Windows Phone 7 doesn't have...windows. Applications run full-screen. While the OS shares many internals with other versions, the UI element that is its namesake is not present. The closest it comes to such in version 7.5 is a card-style app switcher similar to webOS.
- Windows 8 is partial aversion in that it features a new UI similar to Windows Phone with fullscreen apps, however the classic desktop is still available and essentially exists as its own app within the new UI paradigm. It's an OS within an OS (or a graphical shell within a graphical shell).
- The use of "C:\" to designate the first hard drive of a PC reflects its original deference to the 5¼-inch and 3½-inch floppy-disk drives, which were A:\ and B:\ respectively. Computers haven't shipped with the first as a standard since the late 1990s, and the second went by the boards a few years later. Yet "C:\" remains the beginning of the drive alphabet. Thanks to Idiot Programming, some installers struggle when the system drive is given any other letter.
- In fact, the whole system is an artifact of the era when computers were likely to have access to lots of disk drives (at some large companies, they had gotten into triple letters). There's really no need for letter codes any more. Very few users need to go to the CLI any more, and you really don't need them in the folder now called "Computer".
- Indeed, many indexed drives, such as memory cards, and USB drives, are solid-state and not actually disk drives at all, although lots of computers still use drives with moving disks - hard drives and optical drives (like CD/DVD-ROM) being the most obvious examples.
- Two basic operators in the LISP programming language are named CAR and CDR. They were so named because the first implementation of the language on the IBM 704 simply borrowed the names of the machine code instructions Contents of Address Register and Contents of Decrement Register.
- Usenet, the Internet's bulletin boards, got their name from its creators' original hope that that Usenix, the Unix users' group, would become an official sponsor.
- The original purpose of Usenet was to disseminate news of interest to Unix enthusiasts. Hence its division into "newsgroups" and the then-general practice of referring to Usenet as "news", even long after it became just another discussion board swamped with spam and porn.
- Similarly, uuencoding, the system used to translate binary files into blocks of text that could be sent via email and other text media, derives its name from Unix-to-Unix Encoding.
- The "Requests for Comment" from the Internet Engineering Task Force that establish networking standards are usually final documents implemented almost immediately (any actual comments are usually made privately, and sometimes do result in slight tweaks to the standards ... which are then issued as new RFCs). In the early days of the Internet, when ARPA was still running things, they actually did generate a lot of responses, sometimes publicly, and were extensively revised.
- So-called "smartphones" are usually not used as phones. 90% of the time you're using it to take a photo, surf the web, play a video game, use an app, email somebody, or something else that doesn't include calling people. You might as well call a Volvo with a CD player a portable music player. "Smartphones" are really just pocket computers with phone functions.
- The well-known programming technique Ajax stands for "Asynchronous Java Script and XML". Quoth Wikipedia: "Despite the name, the use of XML is not required (JSON is often used instead ,though some pedants call it AJAJ in that case), and the requests do not need to be asynchronous."
Real Life—Others
- Most people in the world remember Valentine's Day as the day of love, but even fewer remember how it originated: being named in honor for a Roman Catholic saint who was brutally beaten and decapitated in the year 269 A.D. Sounds like the stuff of love, right?
- How long has it been since Pepsi was marketed as a digestive aid containing pepsin?
- It's been even longer since Coca-Cola contained coca.
- Coke even got taken to court over it - though technically they charged the product.
- Coca-Cola contains both a decocainized coca base and kola nut extract, though neither have much to do with the flavor. Both were thought to have medicinal properties at the time the syrup was invented. Neither has anything to do with why people drink the drink now.
- Role-playing games is an interesting example. First it only meant a genre of Tabletop Games where players take roles of different characters. Nowadays, Role-Playing Game also means any video game where a character can level up, with rare "role-playing" exceptions where the player's choices actually affect the plot, much to the consternation of tabletop gamers - both in the form of disappointment at the lack of "their" sort of game in video games, the annoyance of people mistaking one genre for the other, and in some cases the deep suspicion that video gamers are trying to make their games more like computer games.
- Some people would tell you that freeform role-playing isn't a game, which depends on one's definition of what a game is.
- It is typical for a person's online screennames to lose their significance over time as the person's interests change; however, many sites do not offer the ability to change it — thus giving them the choice to either accept this trope or create a new account, which means losing whatever history and data the site saves.
- See Network Decay for examples of television networks. For example:
- The channel MTV (Music Television) hardly ever plays music these days. In fact the initials "MTV" now no longer stand for anything.
- Likewise, its subsidiary VH-1, which once stood for Video Hits 1, stopped being a music-video network by the early 1990s.
- G4 isn't gaming related anymore, aside from covering E3 each year and X-Play.
- ABC Family's programming is increasingly less family-friendly these days; the most prominent examples include Greek and The Secret Life of the American Teenager. The "family" part has to stay, though, because when Pat Robertson first sold the channel to Fox (who later sold it to Disney/ABC), there was a demand from Robertson that the word "Family" be in the name permanently, regardless of the channel's owner. As a result, Disney was unable to rename the channel to XYZ and avert this.
- Cartoon Network became this for a time when Cartoon Network and Adult Swim ditched much of their famed animated programming and attempted to put more emphasis on live action programming. They've since backed down from this and are showing cartoons again after the failure of CN Real, but they still heavily promote the few live-action shows they have.
- In American politics, the House of Representatives was initially called that because its members were directly elected by and represented the people, in contrast to the Senate, whose members were selected by the state legislatures. The term "House of Representatives" has been an artifact title since the passage of the seventeenth amendment, which mandated the direct election of senators.
- The British radio station Hallam FM, which has expanded beyond the village of Hallam of Sheffield.
- When a horse leads throughout a race, the win is often described as "wire to wire." This expression comes from the days before the invention of the starting gate, when the field started from behind a wire as well as crossing a wire at the finish line.
- Older people often refer to a refrigerator as an "icebox", even though it's been much more than a box with ice in it for decades.
- The Rock in Rio festival had its name due to being in Rio de Janeiro. The last editions were in Lisbon (leading to a common joke in Brazil: since "rio" means river, it was Rock in Rio Tejo) and Madrid.
- None of the Woodstock festivals have ever actually been held in the town of Woodstock, NY. The name qualifies as an artifact since the original promoters, Woodstock Ventures, Inc., was indeed based in Woodstock (the idea was that the profits from the concert would be enough to fund the construction of a recording studio, the real project). The first one was held in Bethel, not even in the same county; the 1994 Woodstock was held in Saugerties, which at least borders on Woodstock, and the 1999 event was held at a former Air Force base in Rome, NY, almost a hundred miles away.
- BBC Radio 4's Friday Night Comedy hour had a series in the run-up prior to the UK's 2010 General Election. The shows, presented on Mondays through Wednesdays, were still considered a part of the Friday Night Comedy hour. Lampshaded by the announcer saying that they were, confusingly, broadcast on Monday (or Tuesday or Wednesday) night.
- The NAACP stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It is still called that now, even though use of the term colored people is now considered backwards by the general populace.
- Justified in that the association today advocates for all "people of color" (Hispanic, Asian, Native American, etc) rather than just African-Americans. The term "people of color" is still in common and acceptable use.
- But "colored people" isn't.
- The same thing could probably be applied to the United Negro College Fund ("negro" isn't as outdated a term as "colored", but it's still decades out of date) and any country with a Department of Indian Affairs (or similar name).
- There's a language family called Eskimo-Aleut despite the former name having become deprecated in the past few decades.
- This isn't an actual example among linguists as the name is still relevant. Linguistically speaking (and ethnically speaking, unbeknownst to most people who think it is a slur) "Eskimo" is not interchangeable with "Inuit". All Inuit are Eskimos but not all Eskimos are Inuit. And some "Inuit" aren't fans of that term, either.
- Soap operas are called that because the earliest examples were radio serials that were sponsored by soap manufacturers. Modern soap operas aren't—though Guiding Light and As the World Turns were produced by soap and detergent manufacturer Proctor and Gamble's in-house production company up until 2008.
- Radio stations often change their call letters upon changing format and/or branding. Some radio stations have retained the call letters of a previous format, or in some cases owner. For example, WABC used to be owned by ABC but is currently owned by Citadel Broadcasting, and its Chicago sister WLS was founded by Sears, the World's Largest Store. But WGNA in Albany NY has them beat, as its call letters stand for a branding and format that has never been used on the station: Its original owner intended for it to be an FM sister to his religious station, with the call letters standing for Good News Albany. But it's been on air since day one as a country station, as the owner died and his family overturned his plans.
- Despite the fact that more than half of all American households now receive cable TV, many UHF stations are still branded primarily by their over-the-air channel number rather than their cable number.
- This is more likely because the various providers can't agree on which of their channels should carry the respective UHF channel. They still tend to be in the 1-12 range, just mixed up.
- The U.S. Permanent Resident Cards (aka "Green Cards") used to be noticeably green. Nowadays they're mostly yellow with only a hint of green.
- The U.S. Federal "Food Stamp" program is now implemented through a "debit card" style plastic card.
- The name has mostly shifted from "Food Stamps" to the card's name, "EBT".
- The name of Amnesty International made sense when they mainly worked for the release of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. But since the 1960s, the mandate of the organisation has grown to comprise many different human rights questions, making the name way too narrow. As a matter of fact, Amnesty even opposes impunity for certain serious crimes, making the name downright misleading at times.
- The astronomy website nineplanets.org doesn't make sense anymore since Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet in 2006.
- Large trucks made to tow a semi-trailer connect to those trailers using a coupler are called a "fifth wheel". Most of these trucks have more than five normal wheels.
- Pencil "leads" are made of graphite. They aren't, and never have been, made from lead. The stylus, a writing implement used by the Romans to inscribe characters in wet clay, did consist of a lead rod with a point, however, and that's the reason we still use the term to this day.
- Ottawa's Cisco Systems BluesFest (formerly the Ottawa Blues Festival) started out as a festival of Blues music (although the headliner of the first festival was Clarence Clemons ; a fine musician, but not quite a Blues musician). For years now, as the festival has grown exponentially in size and profile, it has expanded its repertoire to include a wide variety of music styles, including Urban, Classic Rock and Heavy Metal, but thanks to the original branding, still has Blues in its name. Every year when the new lineup is announced, the same tired complaints about how "there's no Blues in the BluesFest" come up, even though there are always plenty of legit Blues musicians on the undercard and side stages. Bizarrely, one headliner in recent years that drew complaints from this faction were The White Stripes, who, although an Alternative Rock band, do actually have a lot of Blues influence in their music, and opened up their BluesFest set with covers of John Lee Hooker and Son House songs.
- The word "movie" came from the term "moving pictures." This word could thus be applied to television, internet videos and animation, and video games. However, the word "movie" is exclusively used to refer to feature-length, non-interactive, (usually) non-serialized moving pictures as shown in theaters.
- Likewise, "film" was originally a reference to the medium the movie was both shot and presented in. With today's digital technology, it's entirely possible to record hours of footagenote Itself a reference to the amount of film used in the recording process without any of it coming near an actual film reel in any form.
- "Tape" has now joined this.
- The montage of blown takes that is sometimes included as a DVD extra is still called the Blooper Reel even though today it may not ever have been on any physical medium that requires a reel to play back.
- The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon certainly weren't poor for long — better known as the Knights Templar, they controlled the late medieval European banking system.
- The two oldest political parties in Norway are called Høyre and Venstre (meaning right and left, respectively). When they were formed they were the only two parties in parliament, and the names were thus accurate as to their political leanings. Today there is one mainstream party to the right of Høyre, and several socialist and centrist parties to the left of Venstre.
- The third generation of the Boeing 737, officially known as the 737 Next Generation or 737NG for short. 15 years after entering service, it is still referred to as such, even in promotional material for its upcoming successor, the 737MAX.
- Before xerox technology, the only way to send copies of one letter to additional people was to have it carbon copied. Actual carbon copying is obsolete, but letters still use the term "c.c." to refer to a list of additional recipients. It's even used with e-mails, which lack any physical papers to carbon copy.
- Carbon copy has taken a new life on Twitter of all places, since a short "cc" take up very little space and lets you take more people.
- Sanitary napkins (sanitary towels to UK readers) are still commonly sold and referred to as "maxipads" in the US, even though most manufacturers stopped making minipads around 1980 or so.
- The brand names New Freedom (now defunct) and Stayfree refer to the fact that those products were the first to not require a belt (up to the mid-1980s, Stayfree's boxes still described their contents as "beltless feminine napkins", which by then was the product sector).
- Most U.S. railroads have names based on their original routes or service areas, combined with those from railroads they merged with, that are no longer accurate: Norfolk Southern (a merger of the Norfolk & Western and Southern railroads) serves practically the entire Eastern US; BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) serves much of the West.
- X-rays were initially referred to as such by their discoverer, Wilhelm Röntgen, because he did not know what they were at the time, and so gave them the designation "X" - the algebraic symbol for an unknown. X-rays have now been known to be electromagnetic radiation for over a century.
- The drafts of stories sent out to media organizations, and the live events where someone announces something and may or may not take questions from assembled reporters, are still referred to widely as "press releases" and "press conferences", even though they've included electronic media for decades and the various stylebooks tell you to substitute "news" or "media" for "press".
- The leather straps that standing passengers in the New York City subway once held onto were replaced with metal loops by 1970 due to health concerns about the leather. Those metal loops themselves gave way to horizontal bars within a decade. Yet subway riders are still referred to as "straphangers", and one rider advocacy group calls itself the Straphangers' Campaign.
- The 3 Musketeers chocolate bar used to contain three different flavored pieces in one package: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. During World War 2, only the more popular chocolate piece was kept due to restrictions on sugar at the time, and has remained that way since.
- Having someone paged originally meant sending a pageboy out to find them and deliver a message or summons. This rarely happens now.
- As a result of several confusing decisions by their parent company, Cumulus Media, Atlanta modern rock radio station 99X was briefly on the 97.9note Hey, at least it has two nines in it, right? frequency (before moving to 99.1).
- "The Heartbreak Kid" Shawn Michaels is no longer a kid nor a heartbreaker. He's happily married, and if he wasn't, he's devout Christian now.
- Surnames describe the appearance, occupation, place of birth, lineage or personality of the original bearer, but get passed down to descendants that they no longer correctly describe. We all know Smiths who aren't smiths and MacDonalds whose fathers aren't named Donald.
- In the U.S., the laws like the Sherman Act that are enforced to prevent companies from becoming monopolies and otherwise engaging in unfair trade practices are still called antitrust laws, even though the "trusts", the corporate cartels they were enacted in response to, have long since been broken up by the enforcement of said laws (in the rest of the world these statutes are known as competition law.) This Artifact Title is probably for the best as anticorporation law doesn't have the same ring to it and describes the laws a bit too well to make some people comfortable.
- The laws in almost half the U.S. states that prohibit collective bargaining agreements that require all represented employees to join the union or at least pay agency fees are called "right to work" laws because they're descended from laws that permitted an employee to work if they wanted while everyone else was on strike—they were called "right to work" to contrast them with the "right to strike" that unions were claiming in the early 20th century, now recognized legally. The term has persisted even though the only "right to work" it recognizes is the right to not join the union because it sounds so good that it wins the argument for a great many people simply on the strength of that term alone (who could possibly be against it?)
- NASDAQ, the electronic stock exchange, was spun off from the National Association of Securities Dealers, the trade group which had created it 30 years earlier, in 2001. Since then NASD has itself merged with the NYSE and become the private Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, commonly known as FINRA, making the name doubly apt for this trope as the NASDAQ is no longer connected to an entity that is no longer known by that name.
- MI-5 and MI-6 were named because they were the fifth and sixth branch of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (hence the "MI"), which went from MI-1 all the way up to MI-19. Today all of the other sections have been disbanded or were absorbed into other organizations.
- Have you ever wondered why the doctorate degree title for all scientific disciplines is called a Ph.D. ie. Doctor of Philosophy, even though almost no such field of science has anything to do with philosophy? This is an artifact title from the times when philosophy and science (and theology) were considered the one and same thing. (It was not until the so-called age of enlightenment that these things were separated, but the title of the doctorate remained, at least in most English-speaking countries.)
- In Australian high schools, there used to be the School Certificate which was usually awarded at the end of 10th grade and was required to leave school, and the Higher School Certificate which was awarded after 12th grade was complete and was required to enter university. The School Certificate was abolished in 2011, and now the Higher School Certificate isn't higher than anything.
- When the United States Secret Service was originally formed to crack down on counterfeiters after the Civil War, it was composed almost entirely of undercover operatives who used secret identities to infiltrate counterfeiting operations incognito. Since then, the organization's duties have broadened to safeguarding key members of the American government, and though it still employs many undercover operatives, a sizable portion of Secret Service agents are highly visible security enforcers who aren't exactly very secretive about what they do.
- Few if any members of the Teamster's union (or International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to give its proper title) have to work with teams of draught animals these days. Indeed, it is unlikely that any truckers would even be referring to themselves as "teamsters" these days, were it not for the continued existence of the IBT.
- The middle part of Remote Keyless Entry systems for cars (the button you press to unlock the car from a distance) is becoming an artifact as the buttons are moved from the key fob to the key head itself. Yes, you don't technically need the key to unlock the car, but the buttons are on the key, so it can't be called "keyless" anymore.
- "Geology" and "geography" are artifactual when applied to the surface features and minerals of other planets, since the "geo-" prefix comes from a word applying to the Earth.
- Tae Kwon Do translates as "Art of the Hand and Foot" from Korean, but it gradually evolved to the point where it focuses mostly on kicking.
- Although it's not completely archaicized yet, in the US, you still hear drivers refer to a "service station" where they get gas. That's because, except for the two states (New Jersey and Oregon) that prohibit self-service gas, very few such establishments have garage or repair facilities, much less employees who can or even will check your tires, oil, etc., while you get gas. Convenience stores long displaced them as a profit center for the chains that run more and more gasoline retail.
- In the same vein, it's mostly older people today who use "grocery", a term which originally applied to stores that sold only food, to refer to supermarkets (all of which have vast non-food aisles) in general.
- Airplane "Black Box" cameras are usually orange these days, so as to better find them among the wreckage if the plane crashes.
- The GRE admissions test for American graduate schools still stands for "Graduate Record Examination." This title comes from the fact that it originally included a section where a record was played of questions being asked orally (presumably reflecting the fact that doctorates, and some masters' degrees, require an oral examination to earn). That was dropped from the test decades ago; it's been all written since.
- Hedge funds are used for a much wider spectrum of investment strategies today than insuring against losses.
- The months September, October, November, and December came from the Roman calendar, where their names were in the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th positions respectively. When the Romans reformed it to the Julian calendar, they kept some of the names but shifted their positions. This still remains in the Gregorian calendar we use to this day.
- A number of landmark laws are still referred to by the numbers under which they were considered and proposed, particularly ballot initiatives. California's property-tax cap is still known as Proposition 13 over 30 years after it passed. A similar law in Ohio is likewise still referred to statewide as House Bill 920.
- Many people, particularly older ones, kept referring to manual transmissions as "standards" long after automatic transmission became the norm.
- Northwestern University's name is an artifact of the time when the Chicago area was in the northwestern corner of the United States (See Pacific Northwest, above).
- "The leader of the free world" is a popular nickname for the U.S. president. It's a Cold War-era term, connoting America (and, by extension, the President) being the leader of the western countries opposed to the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. This designates the Soviet leader as the Evil Counterpart — the leader of the unfree world, as it were. The Soviet Union and the communist bloc are long gone, but the nickname lives on.
- Sprint Nextel was originally owned by the now defunct Southern Pacific Railroad. Sprint was an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Intercontinental Network of Telecommunications. Southern Pacific went out of business when it was bought by the Union Pacific Railroad in 1996. The acronym has been long gone but the name Sprint lives on.
- The Railroad Commission of Texas is best known as the agency that regulates energy production and distribution in that state, in particular oil and gas (during the 1950s and '60s, it had the influence over the international oil market that OPEC does now). According to The Other Wiki, it was started as the state's rail regulator. In the late 1910s its dominion was expanded to include oil and gas pipelines and then the actual production; that sector eventually became its primary focus. In 2005 such rail regulation as it still did was transferred to the state's DOT; the name was not changed.
- The Canadian police force is called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police even though they haven't used horses for a long time (except for the occasional ceremony).
- Some abbreviations on the periodic table are nowhere near what their names would make them out to be, because they are mostly words from other languages or archaic names for the elements in question. For example, "Na" comes from "natrium", an older word for "sodium".
- Some languages adopted the older names and stuck with them. For example, Japanese uses "natrium" as the word for sodium, while Chinese uses 钠, which is pronounced "na".
- Civil engineers were so called originally (as in, back in the 18th century) because they were engineers who weren't in the military. As technology and the profession developed over the course of the next century, with new specialties such as mechanical and electrical engineering developing, "civil engineering" came to refer just to the branch of the field that involves designing large pieces of infrastructure like roads, bridges, dams and aqueducts, the traditional focus of engineers.
- In some ways it could still be said to be non-artifactual as, while civil engineers may not necessarily work for the government, a lot of the things they work on are government projects.
- While some nightclubs are known for being very exclusive, they are not actual clubs in the sense of being organizations that have members and a leadership structure.
- This might have been a relic of an era similar to what still obtains in the U.S. state of Utah. Under its famously restrictive liquor laws, bars as such are not allowed. Instead, they are all "private clubs" that allow almost anyone to be a "member" for a night as long as they've paid their dues (don't call it a cover!)
- Not only (as noted above under "Places" is the wall along Wall Street long gone, as a term for the U.S. financial-services industry it's somewhat artifactual since, while the New York Stock Exchange itself is still on Wall Street, the investment banks and brokerage firms that do the actual trading have in recent decades moved their offices to other parts of Manhattan, mainly Midtown.
- Most infants' rubber pants are now made of plastic.
- College football conferences:
- The Big Ten Conference became an Artifact Title in 1991 when Penn State joined to become its 11th member (acknowledged in the old logo which had the number 11 hidden in its negative space) - it currently has 12 schools (Nebraska joined in 2011), and by 2014 will have 14 (add Maryland and Rutgers). There are no plans to change the name.
- The Big 12 used to have 12 schools until 2011 when Colorado (to the then-Pac-10) and Nebraska (to the Big Ten) left and they didn't replace them (Missouri and Texas A&M also left the following year but they were replaced with West Virginia and TCU). Combined with the above, yes, there was a season where the Big Ten had twelve teams and the Big 12 had ten teams.
- The Big East skirted this real closely. It started life in 1979 as a basketball conference with teams from Boston to DC - the only member west of the Appalachains was Pittsburgh. Then it added football in 1991 because of how lucrative the money was, but even then the teams added weren't that misnomering (the westernmost ones added were West Virginia and Miami). Then Notre Dame (Indiana) joined in 1995 (except for football, which it remains independent in). Three schools left for the ACC in 2004, so a bunch were added the next year including DePaul (Chicago) and Marquette (Milwaukee) (these two were non-football members - the farthest football-playing school added was Louisville). Then came the recent massive conference realignment starting around 2008, with the Big East as the tasty carcass because the other conferences had prestiege. To stay alive, the Big East had to resort to inviting any and every decent football program willing to jump from conferences less prestegious than they, including TCU (Dallas), Houston, Boise State (Idaho), and San Diego State (yes, as in California). Ultimately averted - the schools in question (except Houston) all backed out at the last minute when other conferences convinced them to join them instead, and the Catholic 7 (the basketball schools that didn't play FBS football) got sick of this whole mess and will leave on July 1st, 2013, taking the Big East name with them. The remaining schools (those that didn't jump ship by this point) will be called the American Athletic Conference.
- The Jockey Club, which regulates things like the naming of American thoroughbred race horses and keeps their pedigrees on file, has never had any jockeys in it and it's not a club. It is artifactual in that it takes its name from the English Jockey Club, which fulfills much the same function and was indeed started as a club for rich owners.
- Page Six, the New York Post's celebrated gossip column, is very rarely found on that page of the paper's print edition anymore.
- Some days it's been more like Page Sixteen.
- The U.S. progressive activist group Move On was originally founded during the Clinton impeachment to advocate for "censure, and move on" as a punishment. It's moved on to many other causes since then.
- In Canada, Kentucky Fried Chicken had a deal named "Toonie Tuesday", where one could indeed buy 2 pieces and fries for a toonie ($2 coin), after tax. Then it was $2 before tax, requiring more than the toonie to pay for it, then it was $2.22 + tax, and escalated to nearly $3 before the name was retired.
Military and Naval Organisations
- As traditions are rather important to military and naval personnel we see this very often. To take an example; the title of this folder; "military and naval". Today we refer to the word military in common usuage as meaning "the armed forces". However, initially it referred only to land forces; the word itself came from "militia". Lord Nelson would have objected to being called a "military officer", he was a "Naval officer" thank you very much. And this is why
- The US Army's service Academy is the United States Military Academy.
- Military Intelligence usually refers to Army intelligence.
- A common joke is that "military intelligence" is in fact an oxymoron, which would make it an Artifact Title in a completely different sense.
- Cavalry is kept as a designation for units in many countries even though they no longer have horses. Many of these units once did.
- Though to be fair it also refers to the role that cavalry played; fast maneouver warfare.
- Some British and Commonwealth Units plays this straight, keeping names which include "Dragoons", "Horse" "Lancers" etc.
- The 101st Airborne of the US Army is now mostly an Air Assault unit. i.e. helicopter-borne forces.
- Guards Units were initially just that; the King's bodyguard. In most countries that role now is mostly purely ceremonial with them being otherwise normal army units. In some, there is no longer a King.
- While U.S. Army and Marine recruits still largely wear only boots in boot camp, given that they sleep and eat in permanent structures it could hardly be called a "camp" anymore.
- Come to think of it, all the U.S military installations that take the title "Camp This" or "Fort That." The camps have lots of permanent buildings, and the forts don't have unbroken fortified perimeters.
- The U.S. Navy's Shore Patrol, that service's military police, has some posts well inland (like naval hospitals).
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