Artifact Title / Real Life Other

Companies

• With the breakup of the Standard Oil petroleum monopoly in the United States in 1911, the trademark for "Standard Oil" was divided among several successor companies. These successor companies had the rights to the Standard Oil brand in certain states, but were only allowed to keep one "Standard"-branded gas station in each state. Today, due to mergers beginning in The '70s, there are only three companies that maintain those rights: Chevron (formerly Standard Oil of California, or Socal), ExxonMobil (the merger of Exxon, the former Jersey Standard; and Mobil, the former Standard Oil of New York), and BP (which acquired Sohio, formerly Standard Oil of Ohio, and Amoco, the original Indiana Standard). There are many states that don't even have Standard-branded gas stations anymore.
  • Not long after the break-up, Jersey Standard — coincidentally, the branch of Standard Oil that was the defendant in the antitrust lawsuit that broke it up — decided to try to circumvent this with the "Esso" brand for their gas stations. Esso, of course, sounds out the acronym S.O. There were plenty of protests by the other Standards, but no legal action. In 1973, they changed the brand for their US gas stations to the less similar-sounding Exxon (and took the name for the company as a whole). They maintain Esso as their petrol brand name in foreign markets to this day.^note (ExxonMobil has added Esso branding features to Exxon and Mobil stations in some states where BP and Chevron shut down or re-branded their territory-claiming Standard stations, but have not yet opened actual Esso stations in the United States since that merger.)
• The House of Blues chain of live music concert halls and restaurants, while still hosting the occasional soul or jazz act, is seen as a must-hit venue for any band/performer of any genre touring the US.
• In many towns in Canada and Australia, you can find bars called hotels, which dates back to a time in which bars were illegal, and alcohol had to be sold in some other setting. Few of them still rent rooms.
  • Frequently the case in Scotland, where in addition to 'hotel', 'inn' and 'lodge' can often be found in the names of pubs. They often will have a few rooms but people rarely stay in them unless it is in an isolated area.
• Down in Edmonton, the West Edmonton Mall's amusement park was originally called Fantasyland. It was changed to Galaxyland after a lawsuit from Disney over trademark infringement. But the hotel attached to the mall is still the Fantasyland hotel.
• There are several pubs in Britain with "Talbot" in the title. They were named after a now-extinct breed of dog called the Talbot or Talbot Hound. It is considered an ancestor of the modern Beagle and Bloodhound and was essentially an all-white Bloodhound (though other colours have been referenced). The breed has long since fallen out of the memory of anyone but the most avid dog enthusiasts, however the pub names remain the same nevertheless.
• It is common for a new owner of an established restaurant to keep the name the previous owner(s) used, 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.
• Many companies that are named after a person keep that name long after said person or its descendants are of any relevance to the company. Adidas doesn't have anything to do with Adi Dassler or his descendants today, Schenker has been a subsidiary of the various German state railway companies longer than it has been associated with any person called Schenker and so on.
• While Davidson family members still hold positions in Harley-Davidson, the current CEO isn't in any way related to either the Harley or Davidson families. Even sadder is that practically no one from the Harley family has a stake in the company — one Harley relative was reportedly a postal worker in a Milwaukee suburb according to a Cycle World article, though he and another Harley descendant did attend a private reunion of both Harley and Davidson families.
• 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, BlueGrass, and Blues", initially specializing in those types of music (along with "Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers" — the last word connoting voracious consumers of music rather than food). Soon though, instead of being a home for old-time folk music, CBGB 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.
• By the time he passed away in 2018, Stan Lee hadn't been involved with Stan Lee Media for about 20 years. The company itself has been described as "a sleazy Internet start-up that could function as the poster child for the excesses of the turn-of-the-century era."
• Canadian Tire started as an auto parts store in Toronto in 1922, hence the "Tire". It's now a much more diversified hardware, housewares, and sporting goods 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.
  • Western Auto (now defunct) started as an auto supplies store, but diversified greatly in the 1950s and 1960s to the point where the typical rural Western Auto store resembled a Sears "catalog store" more closely than it did a NAPA or AutoZone and auto parts made up a relatively small part of their business.
• The convenience store chain 7-Eleven was named after its hours of operation. Now most stores are open 24 hours a day. 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."
  • Related to this, the Atlantic and Pacific parts of its name fit this, as the long-struggling chain gradually (over a 50-plus year period) withdrew itself mainly to the Northeastern United States before going out of business in fall 2015.
• Any product or store named after a price expressed in an inflationary currency will be this if the name isn't changed:
  • Dollar/"99 Cent" stores in North America. They originally specialized in items that cost one dollar or less (plus tax if not food), but due to inflation, most of their products cost more nowadays. As a result, stores with "Dollar" in the name (Family Dollar, Dollar General, etc.) are now understood to be discount stores, meaning the items are still cheap but not necessarily one dollar. For quite a few years, the notable exception was Dollar Tree, which still sold all items at one dollar, but in September 2021 the company announced that it would completely abandoned its single price point due to rising inflation.^note (It had previously launched a sister concept, Dollar Tree Plus, which added $2 and $5 price points to the original $1 point.)
    • Some big-city independent 99-cent stores have rebranded slightly, adding "and more" or "and up" next to the big "99 cents" on the sign in smaller type. At least one store that had wanted to flag that it carried items for less than 99 cents is now called "Up to 99 Cents And More".
    • Funnily enough, Japan has managed to keep their equivalent fairly well. Almost everything in 100 yen shops costs 100 yen (or 108 with tax). More expensive items tend to be in multiples of 100, rarely exceeding 500 yen.
  • In Hungary the "Twinner 88" chewing gum initially 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.
  • North American discount chain Five Below sold products that were at $5 or below. Due to both inflation and the company offering more expensive products that go above $5, the name no longer makes sense. Their advert now shows "$1 to $5 to $10" to reflect the change.
• American fast-food chain Carl's Jr.:
  • The chain was so named because its first location was supposed to be the "junior" (i.e. smaller accompaniment) of a now long-gone barbecue chain called Carl's.
  • When the chain debuted its largest hamburger, it was rather short-sightedly called the "Six Dollar Burger" because it was the kind of burger you'd get at a sit-down restaurant and have to pay a whole six dollars for, rather than the $3.99 it cost at Carl's. Inevitably, inflation raised the price of the burger to the point where it needed to be renamed. It was called the "Thickburger" to homogenize the chain with its sister chain Hardee'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. Not to mention they have many sites outside the US, adding further redundancy to the name 's meaning.
• YMCA stands for Young Men's Christian Association, and in those days, it was exactly what it said on the tin. It was created in 1840s London by a group of Christian guys who had come from the country to work in the new textile factories as a place for good, clean fun, giving an alternative to various city vices (since the only "entertainment" at the time were taverns and brothels); since period swimsuits were not compatible with pool technology of the time, the facilities had to be male only as they were swimming nude. But nowadays, it's a place where even old Hindu women can go and have fun. (Plus its notoriety as a hook-up spot for gay men, which inspired the Village People song.) It is still an association, though.
• 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 until the studios purchase by News Corporation in 1986 it was actually known by the hyphenated name 20th Century-Fox. At the Turn of the Millennium they made a statement saying they wouldn't update the company name (Futurama's Logo Joke notwithstanding).
  • However, after owner News Corporation split into two companies in 2013, the legal successor company, which owned 20th Century Fox, was known as 21st Century Fox until its merger with Disney in 2019.
• The FX Networks were separated from the Fox network in 2019 upon 21st Century Fox's acquisition by Disney, and it was the only sold Fox property whose trademarks Disney got full rights to. This can be somewhat justified as even before the merger, FX had developed an identity that allowed it to be distinguished from Fox. Tellingly, when Disney began scrubbing the Fox name out of its acquired properties in 2020, they doubled down on the FX brand with their "FX on Hulu" initiative.
• DreamWorks Animation is no longer the animation department of DreamWorks SKG, having been spun off from the studio in 2004. It does however own the rights to the name "DreamWorks", which it leases out to the main studio. Since 2016, the two have been somewhat reunited, as DW Animation was bought by NBCUniversal, which is also one of the six companies with ownership shares of DreamWorks.
• The Phone House still went by its original name of The Carphone Warehouse in the UK and Ireland right up until the final stores were closed in 2020-21, a solid couple of decades after 'carphones' were last a thing.
• 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.^note (This is a fairly common thing for businesses that find themselves unable to do continue as they had but are left with some pretty good real estate: they rent out the properties and make owning land their new business.) For over 40 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 organizations in 14 countries. Its name comes from the now obsolete telegraph address of the original organization: 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. While they still sell donuts, they've also expanded to breakfast sandwiches and have given a particular emphasis to their coffee and coffee-based beverages. Ever since the Turn of the Millennium, they've been branding themselves as a cheaper, unpretentious alternative to Starbucks. In 2017, the company decided they'd try dropping the "Donuts" part from the name, simply calling it Dunkin'. The company made this rebranding official in January 2019.
• Netflix is an interesting inversion. The service's name came from its original conception as a streaming movie service, which was however initially shelved for technology reasons. When the service launched in 1998 signing up and account management was done over the internet, yet movies were distributed on DVD by mail. Video on demand technology improved, however, and Netflix launched streaming video in 2007 and eventually shifted most of its business to streaming, to the point where their homepage stopped even mentioning a DVD-by-mail service anymore (even before it was fully dropped in September 2023), making the name much more accurate.
• 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, and even if their driving sucked they also could be reliably expected to have the income to pay the monthly premium.) It has since expanded well beyond the point that its name makes any sense.
• BHW is a German mortgage company whose name is originally abbreviation for "Beamten Heimstätten Werk" (roughly, “Civil Servants’ Building Society” or “Civil Servants’ Savings and Loan”), a mutual savings-and-mortgage society (basically, a credit union that exists to fund home mortgages) so common in the early-to-mid 20th century, limited in membership to Beamter (a particular class of German civil servant). It’s still in the mortgage business, but it has been demutualized and bought out by Deutsche Postbank, and now does mortgages for basically anyone who qualifies financially.
• The Apple iTunes Store, while originally a store for music, later added ebooks, movies and iPhone apps. And then de-artifacted when Apple began to move away from the iTunes brand name, splitting its content into Music and TV apps on several devices.
• Google Play works well with most of the things they sell, but one doesn't really "play" a book or newspaper.
• 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. Additionally, their symbol on the New York Stock Exchange is simply "T" for Telephone, as they were the only phone company (not counting ones relegated to servicing rural areas in the middle of nowhere) in the US until their forced split in 1984.
  • Interestingly (as of 2018) the company's business sector slogan is "The Power of '&'" yet their own '&' serves no purpose (and even telephony in its traditional form is dying as a communication medium). In their own paradigm it has a different meaning but it is funny when thought of in this context.
• 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 2007, completely retired the name until 2020, when it licensed the brand name to the Chinese company Bmorn, which now rebadges its EVOO-branded devices as Gateway for sale at Walmart.
• Two of the Big Three record labels continue to share their names with major Hollywood studios despite being wholly separate companies. Warner Music Group separated from Time Warner (owner of Warner Bros.) in 2004, while Universal Music Group parted ways from Universal after its parent company, Vivendi, sold the latter to General Electric, also in 2004. The remaining one is an inversion; the Sony Music-operated Columbia Records technically shares the same name with Columbia Pictures, but they were distinct entities until Sony bought them separately (before then, they just happened to share the same name).
• Time Warner Cable became its own company in 2009 after spinning off from Time Warner, but held on to the name; however, since they merged with Charter Communications, they're transitioning into renaming themselves Spectrum.
• Samuel Goldwyn never produced any films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which inherited the middle third of its name from the Goldwyn Pictures Co. he had once founded.
• 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. The mascot Roman guy who says the slogan in the company's ads still has two pizzas on his spear, for the same reason.
• Pizza Huts aren't in hut shaped buildings anymore... They have many hut-less locations inside strip malls (most of which are carryout-only), and have even begun opening full-service locations that aren't hut shaped at all.
• 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).
• The names of the Honolulu Advertiser and Memphis Commercial Appeal, both the major newspapers in those cities, reflect their origins as primarily vehicles for ads with a little copy in between. Their news holes have since increased to the size of other comparable newspapers, and that's what people buy them for. In Honolulu Advertiser's case, The Other Wiki states:
  The biggest story in the first edition was a report on the wedding of Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma. However, the front page was devoted almost exclusively to advertisements. Throughout the paper, Whitney posted fifty-two advertisements for sailing ships in port at Honolulu Harbor with three hundred vessel timetables.
• Gazeta Wyborcza (en. The Electoral Newspaper), the biggest newspaper in Poland, got it's name since it was first published by the Solidarity movement in the run-up to the 1989 elections. However it picked up large enough readership in that time (being the first non state-run newspaper since 1930s) that the publisher decided against the planned name change to Gazeta Codzienna (en. The Daily Newspaper). Thus the name stayed long after the election was over (the fact that Solidarity won in a landslide probably had something to do with that too).
• 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.
• Super 8 Motels originally charged $8.88 per room.
• The Five Guys burger chain is named for "Five Guys" that were the founder and his four sons. After a fifth son was born, the "Five Guys" were retconned into the sons, all of whom work for the company. Today it has a lot more employees than that, quite a few of whom are women, as well, though the business model is still based on five employees running the kitchen.
• 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. The "Ralston" portion of the name reflected the early endorsement of the company's cereal by Webster Edgerly, who in the 1890s founded a weird, eugenics-derived and frankly racist by modern standards social movement called Ralstonism that didn't last much beyond the first decade of the 20th century; Edgerly himself died in the mid-1920s. Yet the name stayed until the company was sold off.
• Supermarket chain ASDA was originally Associated Dairies — Exactly What It Says on the Tin. From 1999 to 2020, doubled as a Market-Based Title as during these years it was Walmart UK in all but name.
• 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 persisted a good five years after the demise of Filene's, although it ended up in bankruptcy, as well. (There was an attempt by the company that owned Filene's Basement to pull a Gyrodyne and turn into a real estate investment trust, as they held a lot of pretty good leases; this doesn't seem to have worked out.)
• 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 the original 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 1970s 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; since nail salons really got started in the '80s and '90s, it's possible that these were founded in the '90s.
• The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway served more than just those three cities. In fact, though the railroad's route followed the old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe itself was only served by a branch line that was built as the main line was being extended towards the Pacific Ocean, and Kansas City displaced Atchison as the eastern terminus in the railroad's early years. As time went on, management began to refer to the railway as just "Santa Fe".
• 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.
• When private rail lines in New Jersey were merged into New Jersey Transit, some of the old line names were preserved, such as the Main Line, which is only called so as it was formerly Exactly What It Says on the Tin for the Erie-Lackawanna Railway.
• Among other American railroads with an artifact title is the Delaware and Hudson. How it got that way is atypical for a railroad:
  • Originally, the company was chartered in the 1820s to build and operate the Delaware and Hudson Canal, which brought anthracite coal from northeastern Pennsylvania to New York City by way of what is today Kingston, then down the Hudson to the city. The charter allowed the company to expand into other transportation businesses and even abandon the canal if it saw fit.
  • And while it did bring the British Stourbridge Lion to the US in 1829 for a test run on tracks near Honesdale, PA (the first time a locomotive ever ran on tracks in the US) to see if this method of transportation might be a better long-term investment than the canal, it decided to stick with the barges.
  • But over the course of the 19th century rail technology did improve, and eventually the D&H began laying track and operating trains as well. Ultimately it built the line north of Albany, connecting New York City and Montreal, that is still in use by Amtrak today.
  • By the 1890s, it had formally dropped the "canal" from its name. A decade later, it closed the canal. So the railroad aspect, which primarily served the upper Hudson Valley and had little to do with the Delaware Valley, had an artifactual name from the start.
• Most US 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; CN (Canadian National) serves not only Canada but also extends down the Great Lakes and the Mississippi to Louisiana.
• Sprint Nextel was originally owned by the now-defunct Southern Pacific Railroad. Sprint was an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal 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 (eventually without the "Nextel") lived on until 2020, when it was retired after Sprint was bought by T-Mobile US (the American arm of Deutsche Telekom).
• US Gold started out as a British publisher of American-developed computer games, but soon branched out to porting arcade games by Japanese companies such as Namco, Sega and Capcom, eventually publishing original games from European developers such as Core Design and Delphine Software International before being bought out by Eidos.
• The French video game company Loriciels (which later dropped the 's') 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.
• A women's clothing store called White House was Exactly What It Says On The Tin — they sold white garments only. Later on, they divided the stores into a second section called Black Market. But White House/Black Market stores now sell more than just those two colors.
• HSBC stands for Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, from the two Chinese cities where it was founded. For the first thirty years or so of the People's Republic of China's existence, the name was half artifactual as there were no private banks in Shanghai under Communism and the bank was based in Hong Kong exclusively. Since the liberalization of China, HSBC has returned to its other original home in a big way and the trope has been averted. Of course, none of this stops HSBC from being headquartered in neither Hong Kong nor Shanghai — its HQ is at Canary Wharf in the East End of London. This location is doubly an Artifact Title, since HSBC's British arm is as a result of it merging with the Midland Bank... which is thus no longer based in The Midlands.
• Limited Brands continued to have that name for six years after they sold of clothing chain The Limited (they're now just "L Brands"). Limited Too, a girls' clothing chain, was spun off in 1999, and continued to go by that name independently of the parent company until it was renamed Justice in 2006.
• Banana Republic got its name because it originally sold safari clothing. It was bought out by Gap, who turned it into a more upscale clothing store.
• Burlington Coat Factory slowly went artifactual. The original store, in Burlington, New Jersey, was in a building that had previously been used as a warehouse by a coat manufacturer (hence "Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse" being the original name). The new business was just a retailer. Soon it was selling more than coats, and within two years it had opened another store on Long Island not in a former warehouse, rendering all aspects of the name artifactual. Downplayed in that they later dropped the "Warehouse" name and then the "Coat Factory" as well, officially just becoming "Burlington" in 2014.
• The McDonald family hasn't had any real interest or control in the McDonald's company or even brand since the mid-1950s. The last vestige of that period of the company's history ended in 1990, when the one remaining restaurant that they had franchised, in Downey, CA, was bought by the company. The franchise is now owned exclusively by the Kroc family — and while "Kroc's" might be a witty name for the restaurant, perhaps with a cartoon "krocodile" replacing Ronald McDonald as the chain's mascot, the original name has such extensive brand-name recognition (worldwide!) that there's now no chance of ever altering it.
• The French Canadian transportation giant Bombardier bought out Canadair in the late 1980s, yet its CRJ airplanes still refer to "Canadair Regional Jet". Similarly, it also bought out de Havilland, yet the Dash jets that company made are still abbreviated as "DH-8", with the "DH" standing for their original manufacturer.
• Newbury Comics started out as a comic book store located on Newbury Street in Boston. By the time it became a New England-wide chain store, it was primarily a music retailer. The "comics" part of the name isn't a complete artifact though, as all locations still have a section for comics and/or graphic novels. Said section has even gotten larger at many locations as the amount of space for CDs and DVDs has gotten smaller over the years in favor of LPs.
• The Christmas Tree Shops are open year-round, and sell a lot more than Christmas stuff (but not actual Christmas trees!).
  • The plural used in the name of all the stores is a more genuine artifact. The original store on Cape Cod was actually divided among three separate buildings, two small houses and a barn that had been retrofitted into shops. All of the newer stores are just one shop. The original store(s) is still in business and still operates out of two of the three buildings, but is independent from the chain and is now called Just Picked Gifts.
• The bar and restaurant chain Yardhouse no longer serves yards of beer. Half-yards are as large as they get these days, and apparently "Half-Yardhouse" just won't do.
• American Express, a financial service company known for its credit cards, started off as a courier service.
• Coleco, the company behind Colecovision and Cabbage Patch Kids, started their existence as the Connecticut Leather Company, who just processed leather for shoes. They then expanded into leather crafting kits, which led to other kits aimed towards kids to put together. They shortened the company name before completely selling off their leather-production facilities in the 1960s.
• London-based ASOS is a clothes retail chain originally named as an acronym for 'As Seen On Screen', as they focused on making duplicates of garments seen in movies and on TV. Nowadays they just make mainstream high-street fashion and run an online vintage marketplace, and don't make any more celebrity clothing dupes than any of the other high-street chains do.
• Duncan Hines, not a company but a brand, is a lesson in how brand licensing can trigger this trope. Hines was actually a real person, a former traveling salesman whose notes on good places to eat and, later, stay in various communities around the country became a best-selling series of guidebooks during the '30s and '40s. In the early '50s he licensed his name to what later became ConAgra for a line of cake mixes and frostings that is still sold today—pretty much the only remnant of his life outside his hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky, and yet one that he had almost nothing to do with once the check for the rights cleared. So pervasive is this association today that a recent biography was almost subtitled The Man Behind the Cake Mix.
• Lemsip, the brand of cold-remedy hot drink mix, was originally exclusively lemon-flavoured, but is now available in multiple flavours and not just lemon. Apple-&-Cinnamonsip?
• The Chinese name of the Hong Kong office of PricewaterhouseCoopers is Lowe, Bingham & Sanford Yung, as before the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand that created the current PwC, neither firm imposed their name to their Hong Kong agencies, Lowe, Bing & Matthews and Sanform Yung & Co respectively.
• The Spanish bank BBVA is still officially known in China by one of its predecessors, Banco Exterior de España, because that's the only bank a given Chinese is likely to have business with — it had a monopoly on export finance in Spain during The Franco Regime.
• Banco Nacional Ultramarino was originally Portugal's colonial banking organization. However, after the Carnation Revolution, most of its colonial businesses were nationalized with the exception of those in Macau, and was absorbed by the state-owned giant, Caixa Geral, in 2001. With the explicit purpose of creating The Artifact^note (BNU is as symbolic of the Portuguese presence in Macau as HSBC is symbolic of the British presence in Hong Kong), Caixa Geral spun off the Macanese business it inherited from BNU to a new Macanese-registered company of the same name which is still wholly owned by Caixa Geral. Which means BNU, after 2001, wasn't even intended to be an overseas banking organization^note (BNU's branch in Dili, Timor-Leste, switched to a new sign that says, essentially, "Caixa Geral — we were BNU").
  • BNU's Chinese name has a convoluted history. Its current Chinese name 大西洋銀行 would more translate to "Bank of the Atlantic", which is the result of the post-Carnation-Revolution Portuguese government truncating its name to make it sound less colonistic. The full story was: Portuguese, being the first modern European country to have a sustained relationship with the Chinese, is rather reasonably be called 大西洋國, or 'The Kingdom of the Western Seas', and the body of water abuts it being called 大西洋 (Western Sea), the latter of which is still used today. While China eventually used the name that's closer to the pronunciation of Portugal in the 1910s, BNU has already established itself as 大西洋國海外匯理銀行, which literally translates to 'The Overseas Exchange Bank of the Kingdom of the Western Seas'. In the last years years of the Estado Novo regime, the name was modernized to 葡國海外銀行 (Overseas Bank of Portugal), but the Carnation Revolution, which runs on a platform of (among others) decolonization, see either of these names rather colonial-sounding. So they truncated the old name 大西洋國海外匯理銀行 ('The Overseas Exchange Bank of the Kingdom of the Western Seas', thus 'Bank of the Atlantic') to something that is impossible to interpret as Lisbon still wanting an overseas empire.
• In the US, some banks, like railroads, have names that still reflect their original purpose at founding. Buffalo's M&T Bank was founded as Manufacturers and Traders, since the former had trouble getting financing from more traditional banks who were too used to traditional merchants' schedules to changes their ways back in the mid-19th century. Today they probably still make loans to manufacturers and traders, but you can also open personal checking and savings accounts there, among other things not likely to have been part of their original purpose.
  • Likewise with the Manufacturers' Trust Company in New York, later Manufacturers Hanover.
• United Services Automobile Association was founded by some US Army officers to create an insurance pool for their cars. USAA has since expanded to provide the whole gamut of banking, investment, and insurance, and while its target market is still those in the armed services, it also extends membership to family of existing members, even those who have never served in the military.
• DR1, Denmark's oldest TV station, was called Dansmark Radio until 1996, as it started out as a radio station in 1925, well before the introduction of television. It is officially referred to in English as the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.
• Record label Arista Nashville is an example, as it was spun off from Arista Records, which itself went under in 2011 (but was eventually revived).
• Defunct shopping mall developers Mills Corporation zig-zagged this. The company was originally known as Western Development, and built several outlet malls throughout the US called "____ Mills" (except for Block at Orange, now Outlets at Orange, in Orange, California). These proved so successful that the company was soon renamed Mills Corporation. They later bought malls from other developers, but other than Cincinnati Mills (originally Forest Fair Mall), they did not attempt to fit the malls to their Theme Naming (or, for that matter, into their usual tenant mix of discount, outlet, and big-box stores combined with entertainment venues). When Simon Property Group bought the Mills portfolio in 2006, they kept the "Mills" named malls as is. Simon later sold off St. Louis Mills, Cincinnati Mills, and Pittsburgh Mills; the former two were renamed to St. Louis Outlet Mall and Forest Fair Village respectively, but Pittsburgh Mills kept its name. Simon also acquired the Jersey Gardens outlet mall in New Jersey from another developer and renamed it to The Mills at Jersey Gardens since it fit the concept of the other Mills malls.
• PX Mart, Taiwan's largest supermarket chain, was established in 1974 when the government allowed a division of the Military of the R.O.C. which operates military post exchanges(PX) to also sell to civilian staff of the public sector, to soften inflation's effect on the latter. This, of course, necessitates opening a chain of PX's outside of military installations. While these stores were returned to civilian control in 1989 and privatized in 1998, the name was retained.
  • Its Chinese name 全聯福利中心, literally "Quanlian Welfare Centers," is also artifactual. These "civilian PX's" were originally called 軍公教福利中心 "Military/Civil/Education Welfare Centers," since they were established to provide welfare (in the form of discounted items) to the said groups. The chain's return to civilian control is by transferring these stores to the Union of Chinese Civil Employees' Consumer Cooperatives, which is often simplified to "Quanlian", which continued to provide discounted goods for civilian government employees (which by definition includes public-school employees) as a form of welfare until its privatization in 1998. Since then these stores have been open to anyone and no public-sector discounts apply.
• Until 2016, it was the case of one of the major bus operators in the Czech Republic, Student Agency, now known as Regio Jet. It still has a branch occupied with the accommodation of the Czech students abroad, but you would be hard pressed to find this activity mentioned on the company's website (unless you switched to its Czech version) or in the media, so irrelevant it has become compared to its transportation business. One may say that their new name is downplaying this trope rather than averting it completely. At least, it conveys some vague idea of transportation, even if they don't own a single jet plane.
• Also in the Czech Republic, many local bus companies, municipally owned and private, still have in their names "ČSAD" (Československá Statní Automobilová Doprava — 'Czechoslovak State Motor Transit') — an acronym from the Communist years when these companies were local subdivisions of the only national bus operator. Bonus points for referring to a disappeared state.
• The (state-owned) company running the trains in East Germany from 1945 to 1994 was called Deutsche Reichsbahn ('German Imperial Railways'). Despite there not being any Deutsches Reich ('German Empire') after 1945. This was — at least in part — an Enforced Trope, because one of the treaties between the four powers controlling Berlin included a line that the Berlin S-Bahn was to be run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn in all of Berlin; while this may have been intended as a temporary fix until some better solution could be found, the political situation developed in a way that made changing this impossible and so the GDR railway was forced into this very strange artifact title. Even after the Berlin S-Bahn was taken over by the BVG (the local public transit agency of West-Berlin) in the mid 1980s, the name was kept because by now people had grown used to it. Deutsche Reichsbahn only ceased to exist in 1994 when it was united with (West-German) Deutsche Bundesbahn to found Deutsche Bahn AG. So not only did the GDR railway survive its state by four years, the Reichsbahn also survived the "Reich" by almost half a century. The Reichsbahn also existed longer in the GDR than under any other arrangement. It was only founded in the 1920s as a consequence of the treaty of Versailles. Before that, the several German states had their own rail networks^note (some small states had sold theirs to Prussia, though) and some private railways managed to hang around as well.
  • Deutsche Bahn themselves zigzag that trope. On the one hand they now own bus companies in Britain and freight subsidiaries in most countries on the globe (making both the 'German' and the 'rail' parts of their name questionable); on the other hand their main business is still rail travel in Germany and adjacent countries and CEO Rüdiger Grube even stated they want to focus more on this "bread and butter business" of theirs instead of the expansion around the globe his predecessor Hartmut Mehdorn was known for.
  • The above-mentioned BVG is an artifact initialism, as today its full name is Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe ('Berlin Transport Company'), which notably contains no G anywhere. This is a holdover from the company's original name, Berliner Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft ('Berlin Transportation Stock Company').
  • Similarly, the German parliamentary building is still popularly named the Reichstag, largely due to the Grandfather Clause, even though the German government has abandoned using the term 'reich' everywhere else and the building currently houses the Bundestag.
• Qantas, Australia's national airline, started life as Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, but has grown well beyond those two regions.
• Volkswagen ('people's car') gets its name from the project started under the Nazis, a design never actually built for civilian use. When the British were looking around for ways to get the economy going in the sector of Germany they occupied after the war, they found the plans all ready to roll and started up production, not bothering to change the name. However, in a more general sense their name still is (mostly) apt as they do produce a car for 'all people'. Their cheapest widely-available model, for decades the Käfer ('Beetle')^note (the car the Nazis intended as the Volkswagen, which was produced starting in the 1930s — for the military — under varying names all around the world until the last one was built in Mexico in 2001) then the Golf and the Polo, was always a very common entry-level car for young people and young families with little to no stigma attached to it and an emphasis on few but useful features and durability. However, since about The '90s, VW has trouble producing cars cheap enough to fit this bill and even some brands within their own company (Škoda first and foremost) managed to undercut the 'decent cheap entry-model car' business model by being cheaper without necessarily offering worse quality or durability. And then there is the issue that buying one's first car which used to be an inevitable rite of passage (Gen X is known as "Generation Golf" in Germany) has become less and less common and due to the diesel scandal VW's once good name is now not exactly the most beloved in Germany any more...
• Airbnb got its name from the founders' idea to inflate three air mattresses in the living room of their apartment and run it as a bed & breakfast in order to make their rent payments. Since they turned it into a company, many guests in others' apartments and homes have gotten to sleep on real beds — and depending on locale and the whim of owner, they may be more expensive and more cushy than actual hotels.
• A number of cities in the United States have a "Yellow Cab Co." offering taxi service. Many of them now paint their vehicles other colors.^note (For example, in Washington they're red.)
• Swiss Chalet, a Canadian restaurant chain, started with an actual Swiss Chalet restaurant, although since then, they've moved on to more traditional square flat-roofed concrete buildings as other restaurants.
• The Electric Boat Company was founded to build John Holland's submarine designs in 1899. At the time, one of the defining features of submarines (aside from their ability to operate under water) was their electric propulsion system, since that was the only means of propulsion available that did not consume air. In the 21st century Electric Boat exclusively builds nuclear submarines, with their last diesel-electric boat having been launched way back in the 1950s!
• Alaska Airlines was founded, as you might expect, for the use of flights across, and later to and from, Alaska, but nowadays you no longer have to ever set foot in the state to fly with them. Furthermore, they aren't even headquartered anywhere in Alaska, but rather in SeaTac, Washington.
• Similarly, Delta Airlines started off serving the Mississippi Delta region and the areas around it. Now it travels to every major city around the world.
• In the case of cruise Ships, Carnival has several of these.
  • Between the Holiday and Fantasy classes.
    • The Main Deck no longer hosts the lobby on the Fantasy class.
    • Averted with the America deck, after the Fantasy class added non-American venues on the deck, it was renamed the Atlantic deck.
    • The Fantasy class added balconies (or Verandahs) on other decks besides the Verandah deck.
  • Between the Fantasy and Destiny/Conquest/Concordia classes.
    • Upper Deck originally stood for "Upper Main Deck" but it's now way more decks ahead than Main deck is.
    • Verandah Deck had a second case, as the deck is a lot lower than it was on the Fantasy, it's not the best of the balcony decks.
  • Between renovations
    • The Sun deck on the Elation/Fantasy+ class after renovations to the Elation and Paradise which make them different from the rest of the class are no longer the highest deck and is now half indoors.
• The Cumberland Farms convenience store chain was named after a real dairy farm in Cumberland, Rhode Island. The farm, one of the largest in New England, opened up a dairy store selling its wares right across the Massachusetts border in Bellingham, in 1958. By the mid-'60s, that store evolved into the first chain of convenience stores in the Northeast. The original farm is now long gone; there is a Cumberland Farms location in the town of Cumberland, but it's nowhere near where the actual dairy farm used to be.
• As originally conceived, the Iridium satellite constellation was going to have 77 satellites circling the Earth. Since diagrams look like an atomic model, the designers chose element 77 — iridium — for the name. Before they even launched the first satellite, they redesigned the system to get by with only 66, but decided that "Dysprosium" would not be a cool name.
• In 2017 clothing retailer American Apparel was purchased by Gildan Activewear, a Canadian company, though its clothes were still manufactured in the US.
• Verisign, a once-iconic Internet company, started off (as VeriSign) in 1995 as a spinoff of RSA Security serving as a certificate authority (CA)^note (a.k.a that SSL/TLS and HTTPS thingy) and digital authenticator, which was what their name was associated with for many, many years (their name coming from "signing" the certificates they issued). However they would go on a shopping spree which made them some sort of an Internet conglomerate, starting with Network Solutions (provider of DNS^note (Domain Name Server) services) only five years later. (In fact, one of the businesses they briefly owned — from 2004 to 2006 — was Jamba!/Jamster of ringtone premium rate SMS club and Crazy Frog infamy during the early 2000s.) Eventually, at some point, they backtracked from this expansion, selling off all businesses except the CA, DNS and a third one involving Internet Security. Finally, in 2010 came the sale of the CA business to security giant Symantec (of Norton Antivirus fame), which included their iconic check mark sign (which has a distinct V-shape and pixelized edges which hawk back to its encription origins).
  • They bought two of their CA competitors, Thawte in 2000 (from Mark Shuttleworth) and GeoTrust in 2006, in both cases maintaining their brands; Symantec, which bought them with the VeriSign purchased, kept them very much alive. The latter has its own interesting history: it was originally founded in 1997, by three former Equifax employees, as a pie-in-the-sky idea like many during the dot-com bubble era, this one focused on the B to B exchange market. This of course failed, but unlike many failed dot-com businesses at the time, it was able to completely restructure by buying out the CA business of Equifax in 2001.
  • This also means that the check mark sign logo now belonging to Symantec, which use was expanded to every business line of that company, is The Artifact for Symantec.
  • Starting in 2015, Symantec came under fire for mis-issuing SSL certificates for various domain names without the owners' knowledge. Google and Mozilla started downgrading trust in Symantec certificates, with an eye toward eventually removing it totally — at the time, Symantec represented 1/3 of the market and was grandfathered (since the Verisign era and along with their sibling Thawte) in the SSL root certificate as trusted ever since Netscape invented SSL and incorporated it into their browser.^note (To keep in mind the seriousness of the situation, let's remind the Dutch DigiNotar case, which caused grave alarm and a possible security problem in the world after it was discovered in 2011 that hackers had issued a fraudulent certificate supposedly for Google, which they then used to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks. They went bankrupt and actualy had to be nationalized by the Dutch government. They had overall very little market share.) In 2018, they sold this business to one of their competitors, DigiCert, which proceded to revoke all Symantec certficates, replacing it with new DigiCert ones, and Verisign/Symantec being taken out of the SSL root certificate infrastructure. (And, in 2012, it was found out that someone had hacked into Verisign's own systems a few months before the Symantec buyout. It is unclear whether the certificate division was affected by this, as Verisign tried to hide it and was wholly unclear about the subject.) As such, Verisign is named after a business which does not exist anymore, and the check mark sign no longer stands for encryption or online safety with sensible data!
  • Symantec itself is an artifact name because of another reason — it was established to develop natural language processing software, and that name means Syntex-Semantics-Technology. The successor of that line of business, a database program called Q&A, ended in 1998.
  • The name of Symantec's most popular business line, the Norton antivirus, is also an artifact name. It cames from Peter Norton Computing, which they bought from its namesake in 1990. Peter Norton Computing no longer exists and Peter Norton no longer has anything to do with Norton products or Symantec. (In fact, until 2001, this◊ pink-shirt, arms-crossed image of the namesake was also The Artifact for Norton.)
• The carmaker Vauxhall is named after the London district of Vauxhall, where their first headquarters were located. However, the company now operates from the town of Luton, while still keeping the old name.
• The Diners' Club credit card (now in the US mostly absorbed into Discover) started out strictly as a way for members to pay for meals at participating restaurants. It later expanded into one of the earliest general-purpose modern credit cards when other types of businesses began accepting it.
• Sega's name stands for "Service Games", named so because the company sold mainly to American military servicemen stationed in other countries. It didn't take long for the locals in those other countries to take a liking to SEGA's games (especially in Japan, which is why it's presently a Japanese company), so they started selling to everyone rather than just American soldiers. The "Games" part still remains very accurate, however, even though SEGA shifted from one type of game to another over the decades before settling on video games.
• Similar to Alaska Airlines and Delta, Southwest Airlines started by serving Texas and the Southwestern U.S. to cover the whole continental US and serve flights to Mexico and the Caribbean as well.
• CD Projekt was Poland's first importer of computer games on CD-ROM. Of course, they've long abandoned that format, and even run their own Digital Distribution service called GOG.com.
  • GOG.com stands for Good Old Games, as their original purpose was to sell DRM-free downloadable versions of older games that were updated (if necessary) to ensure compatibility with modern computers, preventing them from becoming Abandonware. Since then, they've branched out into selling any games regardless of age, as long as the publisher is willing to offer them without DRM.
• Broadcast TV and radio stations will occasionally have callsigns that end up in this territory, if a major change occurs to the station and the owner decides not to change the callsign to compensate. Probably the easiest example to come up with right off the bat is WNET; the callsign used to refer to PBS prior to 1970, NET (National Educational Television). When PBS took over, the callsign was never changed, so the station remains WNET to this day. Another simple example would be any station that is currently an Ion Television affiliate; the former name of the network was PAX, and almost every station run by it had "PX" somewhere in the callsign with another letter before or after it denoting the city (WPPX for Philadelphia, KPXD for Dallas, WCPX for Chicago, etc). When PAX folded in 2005, none of the stations had their callsigns changed likely due to the sheer number of them, so the "PX" remains in all of them to this day.
  • In a similar example, the K/W rule on American stations is currently every station west of the Mississippi River starts with a K and east for W. (Stations in Louisiana and Minnesota, which have territory on both sides of the Mississippi, can use either.) In the early days of radio though, the rules weren't always this way; a few stations have callsigns grandfathered by old rules as a result; WFAA in Dallas (which otherwise follows a "K" rule) and the venerable Pennsylvania stations KDKA in Pittsburgh and KYW in Philadelphia (PA is otherwise "W" territory) are prime examples.
• The Second City line of improvisational troupes and theaters was founded in Chicago, and the name refers to a The New Yorker article about Chicago. There are now Second City locations in Toronto and Los Angeles.
  • The very name 'Second City' comes from a nickname for Chicago that has since become this as well, since it referred to the fact that Chicago was once the second most populous city in the United States, after New York. However, it has since been bumped down to 3rd place by Los Angeles.
• Fujifilm ceased producing film in 2013 to concentrate solely on digital cameras, leaving Kodak as the sole producer of film, but then they started producing a line of instant cameras. Though prior to that, they did dabble into optical glasses, lenses and equipment, and fields as diverse as X-ray imaging and magnetic storage such as video cassettes. While Eastman Kodak, one of their biggest rivals, struggled to switch to digital and went bankrupt as a result, Fuji already saw what was coming as early as the Eighties, and thus invested heavily on fields as diverse as photochemicals, biopharmaceutical products such as stem cells, antiviral drugs and regenerative medicine, recording media, X-ray imaging and cosmetics.^note (The cosmetics part is actually a way to keep the formerly photographic film staff working on something profitable. Photographic films are basically paper or cellulose coated with a mixture of gelatin and other chemicals, and gelatin is also an important ingredient in skincare products, known as "collagen" in that trade.) Besides selling Astralift makeup for those who want to be photogenic, they also developed the antiviral drug Favipiravir which has been proposed as a potential cure for COVID-19. Not bad for a company with the foresight to adapt to rapid technological advancements.
• 5.11 Tactical got its name from a rock climbing rating near the top of American difficulty scale, since its founder wanted more rugged clothes to climb in. But soon the clothes it made became exceptionally popular with plainclothes federal law enforcement personnel, and military contractors, then just people who liked that look. Today it markets its clothes primarily to them.
• The ADAC (Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club), Germanys largest organisation of car drivers, began as a biker club. Recently (=2018), they ran an ad declaring an enforced version of this trope, i.e. that all letters of their acronym are nondescript, some less convincing (they are not generic, they are specific for YOU), some more (it's more a company than a club, and surely not what you associate with "club" — although its legal form is still a union).
• The SM in SM Supermalls originally stood for Shoemart, which stems from when Filipino-Chinese entrepreneur Henry Sy established a shoe store in Quiapo, Manila during the late forties. He has since expanded into selling clothes and other apparel, and eventually practically everything. Not to mention that SM has since expanded its scope into ventures such as property development through its sister company SMDC, which is far cry from just selling footwear.
• Quite a few game developers were originally founded as developers of computer software before moving to focus on video games. Their names often still reference the term 'software', which although technically not wrong is rarely used nowadays to refer to games.
  • BioWare's original business plan was to make and to sell medical software to hospitals (hence "bio" in the title — and the founding members included three actual doctors to back that up), while developing video games on the side, mostly for fun. However, after getting enough money from medical simulations to make their first two games, Shattered Steel and Baldur's Gate, they dove head-first into game development and never looked back.
  • FromSoftware is a similar boat, originally being the developer of office productivity software before trying their hand at the action games they are known for.
  • SCS Software, of Truck Simulator fame, began as a developer of a 3D game engine which it would licence out to others. Their first "game", OceanDive, was an interactive screensaver that served as a tech demo for their work. It took until 2001, four years after its founding, for it to start developing its own simulator games.
• CD-R King used to be well-known for selling blank recording media, but is gradually becoming this as at least some of their branches have stopped selling CD- and DVD-Rs, either due to legal pressure from the Optical Media Board or the general decline in the use of optical media — after all, youths in the Philippines these days would much rather listen to the latest pop acts on Spotify than download stuff off less-than-legal sources and burn them onto a disc like they used to in the 2000s.
• The "DC" in DC Comics once stood for Detective Comics, but the short form was increasingly used as the company switched from detective stories to superheroes — making the full name a Department of Redundancy Department as well as an Artifact Title. That said, Detective Comics is still in publcation today, and its flagship character is still DC's biggest Cash-Cow Franchise (and most writers do at least pay lip-service to his being "the World's Greatest Detective" once or twice).
• Motorola, Inc. was founded in 1928 as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. The "Motorola" was originally its star product, a car radio released in 1930 and named as a portmanteau of "motor" and "Victrola". Victrola was in turn used as a synonym for gramophone, but was originally the name of just a popular model introduced by the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1906 (compare "coke" becoming a synonym for soda, despite originating from the brand Coca-Cola).
• Coca-Cola and Pepsi still carry names that hearken back to their soft drinks' origins as medicinal products, when they were marketed for their supposed health benefits rather than for their taste. Coca-Cola was originally a stimulant and painkiller containing coca leaf (cocaine) and kola nut extract, and Pepsi was sold as a cure for dyspepsia (indigestion); contrary to popular belief, however, Pepsi never contained the digestive enzyme pepsin. Coke even got taken to court over it — though technically they charged the product.
  • Speaking of Coca-Cola, in 1985, The Coca-Cola Company brought back the original recipe for Coca-Cola under the name "Coca-Cola Classic." This was done to differentiate it from New Coke, which had underperformed due to consumer backlash from the original being discontinued, and they wanted to clearly communicate to the consumers that this was the original Coke they knew and loved. Even after New Coke (which was renamed "Coke II" in 1990) was discontinued in 2002, The "Classic" suffix remained on Coca-Cola packaging until it was finally removed in the late 2000's.
• Gatorade today is drunk by a lot more people than the University of Florida football team.
• 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. They got to keep their name at the time because they received large amounts of wealth and land from feudal rulers and the like but claimed to be managing it all on their behalf (so that they could claim to own none of it)... which is basically the modern concept of banking.
• The Busch Gardens theme parks are no longer owned by Anheuser-Busch, and the namesake beer brewery in the Tampa park was closed in 1995 and subsequently demolished (there is still a brewery adjacent to the Williamsburg location).
• The Christian Science Monitor is still owned by the Christian Scientists, but its reporting is pretty secular.
• The Manchester Evening News now has a morning edition.
• Many drug and chemical companies started out with "Labs" or "Laboratories" in their names. That may have been the extent of their facilities when the founders named the companies, but many of them have grown to the point of having warehouses and offices as well that are just as important to their business.
• The "Melco" portion of Macau casino company^note (well, it has leisure, gambling and entertainment, technology, and property businesses in Hong Kong, Macau, Cyprus and the Philippines) Melco International Development Limited's name originally stood for "The Macao Electric Lighting Company Limited" (which was actually one of the first 100 companies established in neighbouring Hong Kong, and is still headquartered there) and it was exactly that — Macau's power company — from 1906 to 1972, when they were ousted by the then newly-formed Companhia de Electricidade de Macau (meaning "Macau Electricity Company") due to not fulfilling their concession contract with the then Portuguese government of Macau.
• The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) was founded in 1824 to provide a charity lifeboat service for the coasts of the United Kingdom and its dependencies. The name has never changed, even after the creation of the Republic of Ireland (and the organisation's continued presence there) made both the 'Royal' and 'National' parts of the name non-indicative.
• Jersey Jack Pinball moved from its original location in New Jersey to Illinois in 2020.
• King's Hawaiian bread was in fact started in Hawaii, but they moved their headquarters to California in 1988 and completely moved their operations from Hawaii in 1992.
• The Russian car maker GAZ has its initials stand for Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod ('Gorky Automobile Plant'), even though the city it is based in was renamed from Gorky back to Nizhny Novgorod in 1990.
• Even after supermarket chain Albertsons sold its Osco pharmacy chain to CVS/pharmacy in 2006, Albertsons and Jewel supermarkets with in-store pharmacies are still branded as Albertsons-Osco and Jewel-Osco.
• Speaking of CVS, when it bought the California-based Longs Drugs chain in 2008, it rebranded its new acquisitions as CVS locations... except in Hawaiʻi, where Longs had become such a large part of the state's culture that CVS kept the Longs name in place.
• Similarly, when Walgreens bought Duane Reade, a drugstore chain operating almost exclusively in NYC and its immediate suburbs, in 2010, it kept the Duane Reade brand name in place.
• Microsoft is short for "microcomputer software", but since its founding the company has started producing hardware as well, starting with various PC accessories, and later branching out into the Xbox line of game consoles and the Surface line of tablets and laptops.
• The Japanese consumer electronics firm Maxell's name derives from "maximum capacity of dry cell," as the company first started manufacturing batteries. They still do, but they also make all sorts of A/V products, from blank CD-Rs to headphones. Their best known product was blank cassettes during the format's heydey.
• The mining company Rio Tinto has had nothing to do with its namesake Spanish river ever since it abandoned its operations there in 1954, tired of having Francisco Franco's government meddling with them during and after the Spanish Civil War.
• "ADT" stands for "American District Telegraph", even though ADT's main business now is security (plus the fact that the telegraph industry has been dead for decades).
• Uber Eats started as a food and grocery delivery service, but branched out to deliver non-food items in the early 2020s. This was lampshaded in a Super Bowl ad in which they remind customers not to eat everything the company delivers, with the motto "More Than Eats".
• The 3rd Generation Partnership Project is a consortium of telecommunications companies, initially to help develop and standardize the upcoming 3G cellular standard. It's still called that even though they've developed the 4G and 5G standards.
• Brightline, the American private passenger rail company, had the Working Title of "All-Aboard Florida" during its startup phase. Its work trains are still given the callsign "AFW", for "All-Aboard Florida Work Train".
• Glico, best known outside Japan as Pocky's manufacturer, was named after their first product — caramels with glycogen(or guricogen in Japanese), then considered a health food. The company doesn't even make caramel candies any more. Downplayed if its full name Ezaki Glico is considered — it is still controlled by the Ezaki family who founded the company.
• In 2010, Meiji Seika (literally 'Meiji Confectionary') and Meiji Dairies^note (the Meiji in their names were not coincidental. They were founded in the mid-1910s by Meiji Sugar — then one of the Big Four sugar refineries in Japanese-occupied Taiwan. The relationship between sugar and candy is clear, but why milk? That's because the company intended to manufacture sweetened condensed milk) merged... mostly. Meiji Seika, has a pharmaceutical business^note (they made Japan's first penicillin in 1946) that they decided to keep under Meiji Seika's corporate charter for regulatory convenience. After the transaction, Meiji Seika, now strictly a pharmaceutical company, merely renamed itself Meiji Seika Pharma KK — or, literally, 'Meiji Confectionary Pharma Stock Corporation'.
• PPG (Pittsburgh Plate Glass) Industries was founded in 1883 as a glassmaker, and while it's still based in Pittsburgh, it's now a paint company. As early as 1900 it was the second-largest producer of paint in the United States, and paint became its chief product over the course of the 20th century. In 2017, they stopped producing glass altogether. However, the company still likes to invoke glass imagery. Its corporate headquarters, PPG Place in downtown Pittsburgh, is a striking skyscraper made to look like a glass castle. And for twenty years it was part of the name of the local zoo, the formerly-named Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, as if to imply that they supplied the glass used in the aquarium, when in reality they had simply bought naming rights. Those rights expired in 2023 and the zoo became simply Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium.
• Australian brand Just Jeans now sells products other than jeans in all of their stores.
• The Globe Telecom subsidiary TM started off as Touch Mobile, initially targeting middle-income families with its voice messaging services. They're now simply known by their acronym, shifting their market to lower-income and blue-collar groups, or the masa (masses) in Filipino parlance.
• While Marikina Shoe Exchange still sells shoes — albeit through an Avon-style networking business model — they've since expanded to selling clothing and other apparel, and perhaps even non-clothing merchandise like electronics from partners such as Ekotek.
• The French chewing-gum brand Malabar originally featured a hunky blonde man as its mascot named Mr. Malabar until 2011 where the mascot was replaced by a sunglasses-wearing cat named Mabulle as the brand tried to aim at a younger demographic. Considering that the word "Malabar" is supposed to mean a strong bulky man, the name makes little sense since this change.
• In Japan and Taiwan, the ice cream company Baskin-Robbins is known simply as "31" or sometimes "31 Ice." ^note If you're visiting Japan and you say you want to go to "Baskin-Robbins", nobody will know what you're talking about. Various reasons for this exists, from "31" being easier to say (though in Japan, they say it in English rather than Japanese) to the Japanese branch being named "B-R 31 Ice Cream" and "B-R" was simply dropped. Yet if you go to a storefront in these locations, you'll see them as "Baskin Robbins."
  • For even more Artifact Title goodness, "31 Ice Cream" is from Baskin Robbin's old logo which was to advertise there being 31 flavors, though the current logo incorporates "31" into the "BR" logo itself.
• The online retailer Zappos started as a purveyor of footwear, its name being a corruption of the Spanish word "zapatos" which means "shoes". Since 2007 they've expanded their inventory to include articles besides footwear such as clothing, handbags and other accessories.

Computing

• Laptops nowadays are placed on desks and tables more often than on laps, and that might have been due to health risks such as radiation and toasted thighs. It's why most manufacturers switched to the name "notebook" instead. There used to be a distinction between the two terms in that notebooks were smaller and lighter than laptops (often dispensing with drives for floppy disks/CDs/DVDs) at the cost of less computing power, but this faded away and nowadays the two terms are used interchangeably.
• Many desktop computers are not placed on top of a desk, but under or next to it. Desktops that actually sat on top of a desk used be a lot more common during the time of CRT monitors; because the monitor would have taken up a lot of space anyway, the computer could be placed underneath it, but this arrangement make less sense in the age of flatscreen monitors, and was therefore mostly phased out in favor of vertically-oriented tower PCs that sit somewhere below or beside the desk. The monitor, keyboard, mouse (and other input devices) still typically sit on top of the desk, however — and all-in-one computers such as Apple's iMac range indeed sit in their entirety on top of the desk. Some larger workstation computers from companies like Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics that were explicitly designed to sit beside a desk were known as "deskside" systems.
• Computer mice got their name because they looked (sort of) like actual mice. Certain kinds of mice introduced over the years such as wireless, trackball, vertical, and many types of ergonomic mice have less of a resemblance to the animal.
• Microsoft Windows:
  • The early versions of Windows simply added a GUI (i.e. windows) on top of MS-DOS, which still handled many of the OS's non-GUI functions. As time went on, however, Windows expanded from just an interface into a fully-fledged operating system in its own right, gradually taking over functionality previously handled by DOS. This culminated in the introduction of Windows NT, which had absolutely no dependency on DOS and was an entirely new operating system. Thus, Windows today has become a lot more than just windows, comprising of a kernel, OS services, libraries, and many other components besides the GUI.
  • Windows Phone doesn't have... windows. Applications run full-screen. While the OS shares many internals with other versions^note (Windows Phone 8 and Windows 10 Mobile would eventually share the same NT underpinnings as its desktop counterparts, to the point that the same black screen of death appears if the OS fails to boot), 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.
• The use of "C:\" to designate the first hard drive of a PC goes all the way back to the mid-1970s, from Digital Research's CP/M operating system. A typical CP/M machine had one or two floppy disk drives^note (either IBM's 8-inch or Shugart's 5¼-inch; Sony's 3½-inch didn't exist yet), which were assigned A> and B>. Hard drives entered the market later^note (they did exist since the 1950s, but were used on mainframes only), so they had to be assigned C>. When Microsoft introduced MS-DOS in the early 80s, they copied the drive letters and several other CP/M conventions. And so, to this day, Windows reserves the first two letters for floppy drives; but as they have essentially disappeared since the late 1990s, in practice C:\ is the beginning of the drive alphabet now.^note (It is possible to manually reassign a drive's letter, but it can cause a number of problems. 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 anymore. 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, USB drives, or internal solid state drives^note (an oxymoron, since "solid state" means 'doesn't move or change' yet "drive" implies movement; the compound term only exists due to the convention of calling computer storage devices "drives") have no moving parts and are 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.
  • The PC98 (which ran a modified MS-DOS) averted this by simply making whatever you booted from A:, whether it was a floppy disk or hard drive.
  • POSIX compliant systems avert this. They don't have drive letters, to begin with. Drives and other storage devices are accessed (if from the command line) by going to the /media/ system folder with devices given generic names like "sda0" or something. And these directories might be on different partitions, different physical discs or even on different machines in the case of a directory being stored on a file server over the network. From the user's perspective, the file system is one logical hierarchical tree.
    • Although that too is an artifact title coupled with Non-Indicative Name. The "sd" means SCSI Disk, as opposed to the "HD" naming convention which was for the older ATA. Now, "sd" is assigned to just about any mass storage device, regardless of what type of bus it uses.
• Some of the keys on the standard PC keyboard have names that don't make much sense on modern computers.
  • Back in the days of command line interfaces, the "Print Screen" key did just that, print the current contents of your screen using an actual printer. Every since the introduction of GUIs, it usually captures a screenshot of whatever's currently on screen, which is then saved to an image file rather than printed.
  • The "Windows" key becomes this when used on other operating systems; Linux systems tend to refer to it as the "Super" key instead.
• Two basic operators in the LISP programming language are named CAR and CDR. Their names stand for Contents of Address Register and Contents of Decrement Register, which referred to parts of the 36-bit memory words used to store lists in the original implementation of the language on the IBM 704. (They were not the names of the actual machine code instructions used to implement them.)
• Many APIs and library functions on macOS are prefixed with "NS", which stands for NeXTStep, an older operating system that Apple bought and used as the basis for Mac OS X.
• Usenet, the Internet's bulletin boards, got their name from its creators' original hope 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.
  • For the transfer of Usenet news, the Network News Transfer Protocol, commonly known as NNTP, was developed. During an attempt to update it in the early 1990s, a proposal for a separate protocol for commands to clients, to be called Network News Reader Protocol (NNRP), was put forth. As The Other Wiki tells it:
    This protocol was never completed or fully implemented, but the name persisted in InterNetNews's (INN) nnrpd program. As a result, the subset of standard NNTP commands useful to clients is sometimes still referred to as "NNRP".
• 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. This process (oddly) seems to be derived from American administrative law, in which certain agencies post "Requests for Comment" on proposed guidance as part of the required notice and comment period under the Administrative Procedure Act; ARPA (a U.S. federal government agency) seems to have inherited the terminology and process, albeit in a very different form.
• The well-known programming technique Ajax stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". Quote 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."
  • JavaScript is by far the most used language for client-side web scripts because it's nearly universally supported, but yes, the name Ajax is also used when talking about this technique in some of the alternatives (such as Google's Dart).
• JavaScript's name is an artifact of a failed marketing campaign from The '90s. JavaScript and Java originally had nothing to to with one another and were developed independently; their names are similar because the two companies behind them, Netscape and Sun Microsystems, got together to jointly promote them as the future of the web, and because they have vaguely similar syntaxes. The idea was that both could be used to craft interactive web-content, with JavaScript being intended for smaller, lighter, and simpler applications while Java would be used to make more heavy duty ones. Except that only JavaScript really took off on the web, while the use of Java applets on the web slowly faded away until most browsers dropped support for them entirely, leaving JavaScript with a name that makes even less sense now then it did in the beginning.
• Most of us are familiar with Apple's iProduct formatting, which has now become a simple trademark accepted by the public. However, when it was first used on the iMac, it stood for "Internet", as one of the selling points of the computer was how easy it was to connect to the internet. It was also meant to stand for "individual" to signify home usage, as contrasted with the professional PowerMac line. Naturally, as other iProducts came out such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, it started being used more as a trademark than anything, and the original definition has since faded away into obscurity.
  • Conversely, Apple as a whole made a move to avert this when, upon the announcement of the first iPhone in 2007, they shortened their name from Apple Computer to just Apple, as their product line had increased beyond personal computers and into consumer electronics.^note (For some time now, sales of traditional personal computers have accounted for a minority of their overall revenue.) Although one could argue that this was unnecessary, as most of their products are, strictly speaking, still computers.
  • Apple's Xcode IDE was named such because it was meant for developing apps for Mac OS X. Over time, this name became increasingly artifactual, thanks to developments such as the IDE gaining support for making iOS apps, Apple dropping the OS X branding in 2016, and later formally updating macOS to version 11 in 2020 with Big Sur. This makes Xcode the last remnant of the X/10 branding.
• The floppy disk icon is still commonly used to indicate program save functions, despite floppies having fallen out of general use since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories also used floppy disk pickups to indicate where to save the player's progress, largely as a nod to the era where the games take place.
  • The name "floppy disk" itself fell into this category with the 3.5" version, which used a hard plastic shell and was the pre-eminent form by the late 1980s — although the magnetic disk contained inside the shell was, in fact, still floppy.
  • For that matter the term "hard drive" for a computer's internal memory. The term was coined to contrast with floppy disk drives but persists despite floppies being obsolete.
  • The use of the word "drive" to describe solid-state storage mediums, such as flash drive or solid-state drive. The latter term is in fact an oxymoron, as 'drive' implies movement, while 'solid-state' means the lack of it.
    • Apple's macOS by default refers to the computer's drive as "Macintosh HD", and uses an artifact icon of a spinning-disk-style hard drive, even though Apple no longer manufactures any computers with a built-in HDD.
• Google's AdSense, the company's cash cow, was originally a feature called AdWords Select, a premium version of a paid-search function called AdWords it had launched in 2002. AdWords Select became so popular that Google dropped the original AdWords altogether shortly afterwards, but didn't rename it.
• ScummVM was designed to run point-and-click games made with the SCUMM scripting language, however, time has passed and more games that don't use the SCUMM language were added to the compatible games list.
  • SCUMM itself is an example. The acronym stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, but mutated from a scripting tool for an individual game into a scripting language standard for all of LucasArts' graphical adventure games.
• The abbreviation VGA, short for Video Graphics Array. Originally it meant a graphics chip shipped with IBM PS/2 computers. The name either means the 640x480 resolution it introduced, or the connector it had (a 15-pin D-Sub), which later added support for much higher resolutions. Some people still refer to graphics cards as VGA cards despite either not having a VGA port or having little to do with the VGA standard at all^note Though most graphics cards, even modern state-of-the-art ones, do support traditional 640x480 VGA as a fallback mode for compatibility. It's commonly used during computer start up, which is why your BIOS/OS start screen might look so low resolution..
• The now-bankrupt Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox got its name from the acronym that reflected its original purpose. It started out as the Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange. After its collapse (and the disappearance of most of its assets), many people commented that if people had known the full name of the place they were storing their e-money, they probably would have chosen elsewhere.
• The x86 architecture itself also counts. It was originally coined due to the first several generations of said processor names ending in the 86 suffix — beginning with the Intel 8086, then the 80286, 80386, and 80486. However, once Intel lost the trademark rights to "386" for the 80386 shorthand, thus allowing clone manufacturers to name their processors with the number, Intel created the Pentium brand and trademark to avoid this. It's been decades since Intel or anyone else has released a processor with a model number ending in x86, which leads many younger people to wonder where the odd and awkward sounding name comes from.
  • The name "Pentium" referred to the fact that it was 5th generation x86 processor; however, the success of the first Pentium led Intel to re-use the name for subsequent generations until the poor reception of the Pentium 4 led them to re-position the brand for low-end processors.
  • Various clone manufacturers continued the original naming moniker, with AMD releasing a "586" and Cyrix releasing a "586" and "686". Linux distros also refer to the original Pentium as i586 and everything after as i686, even though Intel has never officially called the processors that.
  • The 64-bit version of x86 (officially called x86-64) is sometimes referred to as AMD64. This is because AMD first created it and built processors with it, while Intel introduced an entirely new 64-bit architecture called Itanium. However, after Itanium turned out to be a huge flop, Intel started producing x86-64 CPUs as well. This prompted the name change to x86-64, but the AMD64 name stuck around in many places, most notably in several Linux distributions, probably for compatibility reasons.
• The programming language LOGO was named after the Greek word for 'word', and while it always did have words and sentences as data structures, it's best known for something completely different: turtle graphics. The LOGO turtle was invented in the age of teletypes and minicomputers and originated as a turtle-shaped mechanical device that used a pen in its belly to draw lines on paper. Graphical CRT displays made the mechanical turtle obsolete, though many later implementations of LOGO, such as Atari LOGO for Atari 8-Bit Computers, still represented the turtle with a turtle-shaped icon; other implementations drew the turtle as a simple pointing triangle.
• XBMC, an open-source media player. It was originally developed solely for the Xbox under the name Xbox Media Center (and, before that, Xbox Media Player). As time went by, the development team ditched the Xbox platform (with the people still wanting to develop for Xbox forking into XBMC4Xbox) and moved on to Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android among others. This led to the program being referred to as the abbreviation, rather than the full name. Due to this trope and various other complications^note (most importantly, wanting to distance itself from another fork, XBMC Hub [which later changed its own name to TV Addons], that was widely used for copyright infringement — not that it really changed anything, since there is now a larger problem with so-called "fully loaded Kodi boxes" [note the bold]), the decision was eventually made to rename it to "Kodi", averting this trope entirely. (Though, amusingly, Kodi did eventually get a Microsoft-sanctioned release on the Xbox One.^note [XBMC4Xbox is still available as a separate product.])
• Dial-up networking got its name from how you used modems back in the day (i.e., the mid- to late 1970s) — you actually dialed (and we do mean dialed, as pushbutton phones were just being introduced themselves around the same time) the number of the computer you wanted to connect to yourself, waited for it to pick up and give you carrier tone, then slam the headset into (or later, onto) the modem before it disconnected for lack of a computer it could talk to on the other end. Later generations of modems sent the tones or (yes) clicks themselves, and by the 1990s internal modems, which dispensed with the need to use the actual phone, displaced them in turn. Yet the connections that relied on a POTS connection with inline signaling were still called "dial-up" until they were (mostly) finally displaced by broadband in the early 2000s.
  • In that vein, "broadband" is an artifact of when both it and dial-up were in use and the two needed to be distinguished. Had the term "dialup" not existed already, it would doubtless have been called "narrowband". Today just about all Internet is broadband.
• a.out, which originally designed assembled executable files — indeed, it stands for assembler output — now is the default output of compiled executables.^note (Although assembly is an interim step of compilation carried out before creation of the executable, so it's still accurate in a sense.)
• It's a common practice to place executable files on Unix-like systems in directories named "bin", which is short for binary, even if they are text files such as shell scripts or interpreted languages like Python.
• A number of computer components are still referred to as "cards", even if they are included as part of the computer's motherboard and aren't installed as a separate card or add-on. Examples include Network Interface Cards (or NIC, pronounced nick, for short), the part that connects PCs to networks using Ethernet, sound cards (which generate sound and output it to speakers), and, to an increasing extent, graphics/video cards.^note (While many people have discrete graphics cards for high performance use cases such as gaming, the integrated graphics included with most modern CPUs are more than good enough for basic desktop use.) This was because these components used to be installed as discrete cards, until demand for them became ubiquitous enough where it made sense to integrate them into motherboards or CPUs.
  • The use of "card" to describe any component of a laptop, the form factor of which necessitates that most of the hardware be integrated into the motherboard, though some recent laptops still contain drives and other assorted devices mounted as cards.
• Once upon a time, in most browsers, images with an "alt" attribute would display the text of that attribute as a tooltip. This feature became popular to hide Easter Eggs, however, it properly belongs to the "title" attribute, which is where Alt Text is traditionally hidden nowadays.
• Averted by codenames for upcoming hardware, particularly in the video game business. The Nintendo Switch was announced as the NX, obviously, a play on the term "next", whereas the Play Station Vita was first known as "Next Generation Portable" as they hadn't yet figured out a good name for the followup to the PlayStation Portable. Of course, the codenames themselves would have been dated instantly had they been the final names for the products in question — the only reason they're used is for convenience during development.
• While the name "Start Menu" in Microsoft Windows still conveys most of its original ideas (i.e., it's a great place to start if you want to use the OS), it dropped the "Start" label from Windows Vista on (at least when using the default skin). So if someone who's brand new to Windows and isn't familiar with the OS family before Vista, saying "Start Menu" may give you a confused look.^note (Although the name is still used on Windows 10: right-click on an application, and one of the options is "Pin to Start".)
• IBM's "ThinkPad" line of portable computers. You'd think the name would make more sense for tablets. Well, the original model was indeed one, but the name was soon reused for laptops.
• AMD still uses the ATI brand name internally for system files and/or drivers pertaining to their Radeon line of graphics processing units, e.g. "AtihdWT6.sys", despite the ATI moniker being dropped long ago. It could be assumed that this is being done for backwards compatibility reasons, but that is moot as the latest drivers no longer support graphics cards and IGPs sold under the ATI brand.
• The EMMC standard, short for Embedded MultiMedia Card, is an internal variant of the MultiMediaCard architecture which integrates the flash memory and controller into a single chip. The name is a sort of a misnomer as the standard is used on non-removable storage (not counting those removable EMMC boards used on entry-level laptops), rather referring to its lineage with traditional MMC which is compatible with. Indeed, there exists EMMC adapters which allow an EMMC module to interface with a standard MMC/SD card slot, the intention being they're designed to be for development purposes on (prototype) devices without any internal storage module embedded in it.
• Packages in the Fedora Linux distribution still identify the version of Fedora they're made for with the string fc{version-number}, with FC standing for "Fedora Core", which was the name of the OS before version 7, after which it was shortened to just Fedora.
• In Windows' sound settings, the sound used for dialogue boxes marked with an information sign is called "Asterisk", because that was the symbol for those kinds of dialogue boxes in Windows 1.0. Additionally, the "Critical Stop" dialogue boxes are internally named "Hand" after their Windows 1.0 symbol.
• PC manufacturers still often refer to the low-level firmware as the "BIOS" despite Microsoft mandating that modern PCs use UEFI firmware instead. UEFI typically has a "Legacy BIOS" mode for backwards compatibility, to muddy things further.
• The OpenGL graphics Application Programming Interface got its name because it was originally created as an open-source alternative to Silicon Graphics' proprietary IrisGL API. OpenGL eventually superseded IrisGL completely, and Silicon Graphics as a whole later went defunct, making the OpenGL name artifactual. You could argue that the name still makes a certain amount of since given that OpenGL is the cross-platform, open standard for computer graphics that mainly competes with the proprietary alternatives such as Microsoft's Direct3D and Apple's Metal.
• The Compaq computer corporation's flagship product was a portable (a.k.a. "luggable") IBM compatible PC with the name of the company based on the "compact" nature of their design. Compaq later went on to be a major manufacturer of desktop computers, but the name stuck based on their first portable product.
• The Unix "tar" command for collecting a number of files into one archive originally stood for "tape archiver", when that was the preferred format for backups. It's still widely used for backups and software distribution on Unix-like operating systems, just on different media. Even enterprises still rely on tape backup because of its durability and reliability, just on cartridges instead of open reels.
• The QuakeNet IRC network was originally established for players of Quake, but has branched out to channels on just about everything.
• The command line interpreter window on Windows is informally known as a "DOS box" (not to be confused with the emulator), even though on NT systems it's not based on MS-DOS at all.
• Microsoft's Visual Basic allowed users to create a user interface by laying out components graphically instead of writing code, hence the "visual" in the title. Later "visual" products for other programming languages followed, and eventually merged into one application for any form of development: Visual Studio. Years later, Microsoft released a lightweight sister version called Visual Studio Code which didn't include the visual UI designer, rendering the "Visual" in the title obsolete.
• Cell phones' SIM cards are named so because the original form factor from 1991 had the exact size and shape of a credit card.
• The Xfce desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems originally stood for XForms Common Environment, a name that became obsolete in 1999 when it stopped using the XForms toolkit and switched to GTK+.
• Microsoft Windows still stores important operating system files and programs in a folder called system32, even on 64-bit systems. Counterintuitively, there is another folder on 64-bit systems called SysWOW64, which is a 32-bit version of system32 that enables backwards compatibility with 32-bit programs.^note (WOW64 stands for Windows on Windows 64, the compatibility layer used to run 32-bit apps.)
• The European Train Control System is a signalling system created to standardise train signalling in Europe and enable semi-automated train running. The system is popular and robust enough however that it is the de-facto default signalling system for lots of new railways all over the world.
• In computer graphics, a shader is a program that runs on a Graphics Processing Unit. The name comes from the fact that the earliest and simplest uses of the technology involved applying shading to the pixels of an image. But the fact that they are programmable meant that they are incredibly flexible, and thus numerous use cases for them were developed beyond simple shading. This included vertex shaders, which transform 3D vertices instead of 2D pixels, as well as compute shaders, which don’t necessarily have anything to do with graphics and can perform arbitrary calculations to help with things like physics or data decompression. In spite of all this, the term shader has stuck around to refer to all of these, even though they’re used for much more than simple shading these days.
• The package manager for the Linux OS family Red Hat is named "yum", for "Yellowdog Updater Modified." Yellowdog refers to Yellow Dog Linux, which was an offshoot of Red Hat that gained some prominence in the early 2000s.
• PC motherboards have something called a "chipset," which was literally a set of chips that handled various data routing parts. Primarily, the chipset would handle the main data bus (shuttling information between main memory, the CPU, and the rest of the system), interrupt catching, a clock generator, and in some cases, co-processors. In most modern systems, many of these functions have been integrated into the CPU such that even those from Intel or AMD can run without a chipset and what's called the chipset today is usually a single chip that's basically a bunch of internally wired PCI-Express lanes.

Currencies

A lot of different currencies have names connected to being of particular material, weight, shape or place, and are bound to fit this trope once any of these change.

• A number of languages, like Hebrew, have a word for money that means 'silver', even if hardly any use actual silver coinage nowadays.
• The first money in Ancient Greece was bronze or iron rods (obols), sometimes grouped into "handfuls" (drachmas) of six. Therefore, the first coins were still called "obols" and "drachmas", even though the old money system was only retained in Sparta. All the later units which were named after it, like the AED Dirham, have been coins from the start.
• The Roman denarius got its name from being worth ten copper asses. However, modern dinars are usually divided into a hundred or a thousand smaller units, like most currencies nowadays.
• In Russia:
  • The word for money is den'gi, referring to a particular type of coin. The last time coins called that (half a kopeck) were minted was 1867 — and that name was a diminutive: denezhka. A coin called den'ga was last minted in 1838.
  • Kopeck is called that because the first coin had a man holding a spear (kop'yo) upon them. Historically, a lot of kopecks had no such image upon them, although the ones in modern Russia do.
  • The oldest money was called grivna, meaning torc, or necklace. Presumably, such necklaces were used for trading, but later, even coins had that name. The Ukrainian unit of currency, the hryvnia, comes from the same origin.
  • Ruble comes from the root for cutting, referring to either it being a part of cut-apart grivna or having a scarlike seam from being cast into a mold. Today, metal coins have no such seam, even if making a paper bill might involve cutting.
  • The word chervonets referred to the fact the coin was made of red gold. In addition to the word often being used to mean paper bills, there was a time in the 19th century when they were minted out of platinum.
• The thaler is short for Joachimstaler; minted at the town of Joachimstal (Jáchymov). A lot of coins were minted elsewhere under that name, sometimes changed into daler or dollar.
• Switzerland's currency is still referred to as "the Swiss franc" and abbreviated SFr, even though since the introduction of the euro in 2002 there hasn't been any need to distinguish it from the Belgian or French franc.^note (A couple of former French colonies still call their currency the franc, yes, but they're not fully convertible or even traded much.)
• The Chinese yuan, the Japanese yen and the Korean won all mean "round", yet can be bills nowadays just as easily as coins.
• Gulden means, of course, 'golden', but the name was used for both silver coins and paper bills.
• The Polish złoty likewise means 'golden'.
• The shekel was originally a unit of weight, quite different from the weight of the modern Israeli coins, never mind bills.
  • The Israeli currency is still called the 'new shekel', although the switch from the old shekel was in 1985.
• The American Money system has a few examples:
  • The 1-cent coin is called the penny, even though the US uses cents and not pence, the British currency of which "penny" is the singular form.
  • Nickels (5-cent pieces) were a temporary case, being made of silver and copper during World War II, nicknamed "war nickels". Nowadays they're 25% nickel.
  • The ten-dollar bill is still sometimes called a "sawbuck"; this dates back to an earlier design which featured a prominent Roman numeral "X", which resembles a sawhorse as seen from the end.
• The British currency, the pound sterling, originated in the late 11th century and referred to literally 1 pound of Norman coins called 'sterlings' that were 92.5% pure silver (a purity that became known as "sterling silver"). The name has remained to this day, but the pound sterling has long since ceased to have any relation to silver, being a typical fiat currency. And in late-2020 silver prices, 1 pound of sterling silver is worth about £180.
• The name "real" means royal, yet today it's the currency of Brazil, which has been a republic for well over a century. Similarly, two present-day republics use currencies named 'crown': Czechia (Czech koruna) and Iceland (Icelandic króna). Before the adoption of the Euro, they were accompanied by Estonia (Estonian kroon) and Slovakia (Slovak koruna).
• Rupee used to mean a silver coin.
• Som means 'pure', referring to the coin having once been pure gold.
• Peso means 'weight'. Paper bills have very little of that.
• The currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the Convertible Mark. The name is meant to be in reference to the fact that it is pegged to the Deutsche Mark, which is no longer the case since Germany adopted the Euro; it is now pegged to that currency instead.

Other media

• "Right Turn" is a column in The Washington Post by Jennifer Rubin, "offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective" in an otherwise liberal newspaper. That being said, Rubin's political views shifted considerably leftward since Donald Trump became president.
• The landmark pro-Tort Reform book Atiyah's Accidents, Compensation and the Law (originally 1970), on which ideas New Zealand's reform was based, hasn't been updated by its namesake Patrick S. Atiyah since 1997, but by Peter Cane. In The Damages Lottery (1997), he still defends some form of no-fault tort reform, but private-insurance based^note (based on the mandatory insurance for cars model) instead of government-fund based^note (based on the workers' comp model) as in his previous book (and implemented via the Accident Compensation Corporation in New Zealand).
• At first, role-playing games 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 screen names to lose their significance over time as the person's interests change (or worse, if someone bases their screenname around a name they've since discarded, e.g. if they've since come out as transgender); 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.
  • Some may choose to keep or make a new variant of their old ones just for the sake of familiarity (usually depending on how long they've used and been on the site) or for other reasons.
  • Email addresses are likewise immutable, however it is possible to somewhat circumvent this by creating a new email account and then having the old email account forward all incoming email to the new one. However, old messages won't carry over, so to keep access to them without having to switch accounts, one will need to use an email client that consolidates multiple accounts' inboxes into one unified inbox.
  • Likewise, as xkcd points out, the area code of many North Americans' cell phone numbers reflects wherever they were living in 2005 or so.
• 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 Procter & Gamble's in-house production company up until 2008.
• 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 footage^note (itself a reference to the length of film used in the recording process) without any of it coming near an actual film reel in any form.
  • "Tape" has joined this since 2006/2007, when VHS was phasing out and being discontinued.
  • 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.
  • CD stands for Compact Disc, which could still refer to DVDs and Blu-rays since they are all the same size. DVD stands for Digital Video (later Versatile) Disc, which could still logically refer to CDs or Blu-rays. There have also since been even smaller disc formats introduced over the years, such as mini-CDs or mini-DVDs, and yet the CD retains its name.
• 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".
• As a result of several confusing decisions by their parent company, Cumulus Media, Atlanta modern rock radio station 99X was briefly on the 97.9^note Hey, at least it has two nines in it, right? frequency (before moving to 99.1).
• Podcasts got their name from the fact that they initially became popular as digitally downloaded audio files, and most people listened to them on MP3 players (of which Apple's iPod was the most popular brand). Podcasts are still quite popular as a media format — but due to the ubiquity of smartphones and online streaming, very few people listen to them on iPods anymore.
• Regional releases of video games are still often called or classified with names like NTSC and PAL, even though these names refer to analog television formats that the transition to digital HDTV made obsolete. Indeed, no console since the Wii U has even supported analog televisions, making it weird to call an eighth generation game NTSC or PAL.
• Novels are called such because at one point the idea of writing long-form fiction in prose (as opposed to poetry or verse) was, well, novel. Of course, this was hundreds of years ago, and since then novels have perhaps become the most popular form of literature in the world, yet the name sticks around.
• Movie trailers were originally named because they came after, and therefore 'trailed', the movie. Once film companies realized most people didn't stay until after the credits just to watch ads, they were moved to before the movie started (and now with many film companies premiering movie trailers on the internet, on television, or at conventions, it's even more of an artifact name).
• Sports teams usually don't change the city parts of their names when relocating, unless they relocate a significant distance. Take for example, the San Francisco 49ers. Historically, they had played in San Francisco, first at Kezar Stadium, then across town at Candlestick Park^note (which would later be renamed 3Com Park, then Monster Park, then back to Candlestick before the stadium was demolished), but in 2014 they began playing at a new stadium, Levi's Stadium, in Santa Clara about 50 miles south of San Francisco. They're still called the San Francisco 49ers, likely because the names "Santa Clara 49ers" and "San Jose 49ers" (San Jose being the nearest major city to Levi's Stadium, and which is in fact larger than San Francisco both in population and area) would make longtime fans go "where??" That said, the team name has technically been an Artifact Title since the 80s when the 49ers moved their headquarters to Santa Clara, while continuing to play in San Francisco.

Politics

• The Chancellor of the Exchequer is the minister in charge of the Treasury of the United Kingdom, generally regarded as the second most powerful person in the British government after the Prime Minister. The 'exchequer' originally referred to a table with a chequerboard (checkerboard) cloth that was used, beginning during the reign of King Henry I, to keep track of the royal treasury. The Exchequer eventually became the term used for the office in charge of revenue collection. It ceased to exist in the 19th century as its tasks were spread over time to other ministries and organisations (such as the Bank of England), though the ministerial office for the Treasury preserved the phrase in its title. Today, "exchequer" is a colloquial phrase used for balance sheets, public or private, in the British Commonwealth.
• California being referred to as a "Republic" is zig-zagged. It ceased being its own independent Republic in 1846, but the words remain on the flag. However, the Constitution of the United States requires all states to be governed as "republics".
• The American 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. That said, the Representatives still represent their districts, so it isn't completely outdated.
  • The term 'senate' itself derived from the Latin word senex, meaning an old man — the same word-root also gives us both 'senior' and 'senile'. The Roman Senate literally meant 'the place of old men' because its senators were (originally at least) retired magistrates. The term was then appropriated by many other countries for their legislatures, which are neither exclusively old or exclusively men. That said, senators everywhere are still mostly men, and they tend to be older: for instance, in the US Senate, although the constitutional minimum age for senators is 30, the youngest is typically in his/her late 30s or early 40s^note (though this isn't to say you don't get the occasional one in their early 30s; indeed, Joe Biden was elected at age 29 and was only eligible for his first term because his late-November birthday meant he turned 30 between his election and the seating of the new Congress in January), with the vast majority being substantially older. Indeed the US Senate, for a few reasons (seniority and pork barrel spending among them), frequently features very elderly senators — who are sometimes visibly senile — still reelected from their states; a senator in his 90s (this has thus far rarely ever happened with female senators, with the only female Senator to reach such an advanced age while in office was longtime California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who held her seat from the time she was elected in a 1992 special election until her death in late September 2023) is no uncommon sight on the floor. A particularly interesting phenomenon is an old senator doing a filibuster: talking for hours on end, often about totally unrelated subjects, to defeat or delay a measure of legislation.
  • The official appointed by the US president and confirmed by the Senate to oversee the Capitol building complex's physical plant and maintenance is known as the Architect of the Capitol, from the days when the building had not yet been completed but Congress met there anyway as the chambers could be functionally occupied. The title is doubly artifactual as, while most of the recent Architects have had an advanced engineering credential, they do not have to be architects.
• The position of District Attorney in many US states derives from the state organizing counties into "judicial districts" to maintain courts and a public prosecutor on the state's behalf during the early days of settlement, since many counties were too sparsely populated to justify having their own separate courts and prosecutors. Nowadays many counties have enough people to have their own prosecutor, but the position's title remains. That said, this is commonly explained away by having the "judicial districts" being technically something different from the counties, but "just so happening" to correspond to the boundaries of the counties.
• The first five Roman Emperors all had 'Caesar' as their family name, not as a title. That name's meaning potentially came from caesaries (curls) and referred (depending on whom you ask) to either an ancestor's exceptional hairiness or as an ironic comment on said ancestor's baldness (equivalent to calling the bald guy "Curly"); certainly, the jokes in Rome caught on to the latter idea in reference to the bald Julius Caesar himself). However it quickly became a title used by all Emperors, no matter how hirsute they were. This later spawned the monarchical titles Kaiser, Czar and Tsar.
• The modern city of Rome still uses the "SPQR" abbreviation for its municipal government, just as the imperial capital did. It stands for Senatus Populus que Romanus — 'Senate and People of Rome'. Not only is it artifactual linguistically as today's Romans speak what is only a distant form of Latin in the shape of modern Italian, but Rome hasn't had a Senate governing it specifically^note (Italy has a Senate, but its members come from all over the country) since the early 7th century.
• 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" for minorities is now considered backwards by the general US populace. But nowadays, it's justified in that the association today advocates for all "people of color" (Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, etc.) rather than just African Americans. The term "people of color" is still in common and acceptable use.
  • The same thing could probably be applied to the United Negro College Fund, an outdated term in the name of an organization that still exists.
• UNICEF's original name, from whence its acronym comes, was the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. That reflects its establishment in late 1946 to attend to the needs of the many refugee children all over Europe still displaced in the wake of the war. That emergency is long since over and the agency has extended its scope to all children in the world in need regardless of the situation; officially it's now called simply the United Nations Children's Fund. Yet they still use the original acronym, probably because it's easier to pronounce — the name is also so well-known that changing it would just confuse people.
• The US Permanent Resident Cards (a.k.a. "Green Cards") used to be noticeably green. Nowadays they're mostly yellow with only a hint of green.
• The US Federal "Food Stamp" program is now implemented through debit cards. The popular term for the program has mostly shifted from "Food Stamps" to the card's name, "EBT". And the official name of the program itself is now Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or "SNAP").
• 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 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; Høyre backed the aristocracy and landed interests, opposing further democratization, while Venstre backed the liberal bourgeoisie and emerging industrial/commercial interests and supported more democratization. In the early 20th century, the Labour Party eclipsed Venstre to become the largest left-wing party, resulting in the latter ending up being allied with its former conservative opponents. These days, Venstre is a small centrist or "left-liberal" (i.e. very slightly centre-left) party with its base of support drawn from squishy well-off intellectuals; meanwhile Høyre is the main centre-right party (the 'Progress Party' outflanking it on the populist right), and largely draws its support from, er, bourgeois industrial/commercial interests.
  • Even more confusingly, the Venstre (same meaning) party in Denmark is actually the largest (centre-)right-wing party. It has similar origins to the Norwegian Venstre party, having opposed a party called "Højre" (same meaning as "Høyre"), which became the Conservative People's Party and now works closely with its erstwhile opponents Venstre.
  • Nordic Agrarian parties are generally called Centre Party, despite generally being perceived as right-wing parties in the last few years.
• Similarly, one can join, and be supported as a candidate by, Britain's Labour Party without ever having been a union member; and indeed, while Labour grants a significant decision-making role to the Trade Unions Congress, it has support from many other groups outside the labour movement as well.
• Britain's other major party, the Conservative Party, has as its full legal name the Conservative and Unionist Party. As of mid-2018 that last part is beginning to seem like it might be artifactual as a majority of members say in polls that they would allow Scotland to declare independence, and Northern Ireland to reunify with the Republic of Ireland, if that was what it took to make Brexit happen.
  • In fact, it was already an artifact way before. The Conservatives got their full name after absorbing the smaller Liberal Unionist Party^note (nothing to do with the current-day Liberal Democrats), whose main raison d'étre was opposing an Irish Home Rule Parliament^note (i.e., like the "devolved" ones Scotland and Wales have today). After World War I and the Irish War of Independence, this cause didn't make sense anymore.
• In the US, 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 anti-monopoly law (or "pro-competition 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 US states that prohibit collective bargaining agreements, which 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?).
  • Note, however, that this meaning of "right to work" only exists within the United States. As Rational Wiki notes, outside the US (and for the United Nations) the "right to work" actually means the "right to have a job" (guaranteed by government full employment programs) and is defended by trade unionists.
• A number of landmark laws are still referred to by the numbers under which they were considered and proposed, particularly ballot initiatives. Even when the number gets reused, in some cases repeatedly, over the years. California's property-tax cap is still known as Proposition 13 more than 40 years after it passed. A similar law in Ohio is likewise still referred to statewide as House Bill 920. This can get confusing in some cases, such as the four different amendments to California's constitution that were all passed as Proposition 8. Not to mention the ten other California ballot initiatives voted on as Proposition 13, six of which predated the 1978 law.
  • Similarly in Canada the law that made same-sex marriage legal nationwide is usually referred to by its bill number (C-38) even though that number has been reused several times since for completely different bills. In fact, on The Other Wiki, "Bill C-38" redirects to its page on a 2012 omnibus economic bill.
• One of the largest parties in Iceland is the Independence Party, founded in 1929. The name comes from their main policy of complete independence from Denmark; which the country got in 1944, so is no longer an issue, but the name remains to this day.
• "The leader of the free world" is a popular nickname for the US 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.
  • Another bit of geopolitical terminology that survived the Cold War is the idea of first-world versus third-world countries. Originally, the terms were a quick way to describe which side of the conflict a nation fell on — the First World consisted of the US and its allies, the Second World consisted of the Soviet Union and its allies, and the Third World consisted of neutral/unaffiliated nations. By the time the USSR collapsed, the meanings of the terms had begun to shift towards distinguishing between stages of socioeconomic development instead, while the concept of a second-world country vanished almost entirely.
• The Nazi Party's full name was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ('National Socialist German Workers' Party'), but Adolf Hitler purged the Party's socialist elements soon after taking power and never bothered changing the name.
• The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia is neither liberal nor democratic, it's a populist nationalist party. However, back in Soviet times they did advocate something more liberal and democratic than the Communists.
• It would seem that the Canadian House of Commons — named for the corresponding body in Britain — is one of these, because Canada, unlike Britain, has no aristocracy (save the Royal Family, who live in Britain anyway) and thus has a Senate rather than House of Lords. However, this is actually an aversion: "Commons" in the phrase 'House of Commons' (both in Britain and Canada) doesn't refer to a distinction between "commoners" and "nobles" but actually refers to (settled) communities — because each MP in both Canada and Britain represents all or part of a particular town, city, or other populated region, which has been true since each was established^note (in the British body's case, its institutional predecessor the English House of Commons formed because the elected representatives of the urban boroughs and 'knights of the shire' elected to represent the rural counties met separately from the lords who held their seats by right. The meeting became known as the "commons" because that was a word used back then to mean 'places where people live'), and is still the case today. The implication of the term, in other words, is not 'House of Commoners' but 'House of Communities'. The official French name of the Canadian body, Chambre des communes (which, over-literally translated, means 'Chamber of Towns') makes this much clearer.
  • The confusion arises because, historically, practically every member of the British House of Commons was a 'commoner' — but only in the trivial sense that in British law, this meant anyone who is not (1) the Sovereign, (2) a Peer, or (3) married to the Sovereign or a Peer. Since until the House of Lords Act 1999 a peer was by definition a member of the House of Lords, members of the House of Commons were very obviously not peers (you can't sit in both houses) and thus by definition legally "commoners", except on the rare occasion that a peer's spouse took a seat in the Commons — which did happen (see Nancy, the Viscountess Astor, one of Winston Churchill's favourite parliamentary sparring partners) but not that often. In this sense, even the children of the monarch him/herself are commoners until they get their titles: indeed, the future King William IV had, while still young and far from the throne (being merely the third son of a living king) famously got himself a peerage by threatening to stand for the House of Commons, for which he was eligible because he was not a peer.
• By the same token, the presiding officer of the lower house in many Westminster-system legislative bodies throughout the English-speaking world (and in some outside it) is called the 'Speaker' of that house. This was because the original Speakers of the (English) House of Commons in the 14th century also had the responsibility of communicating to the sovereign the results of the Commons' deliberations, as well as presiding over those deliberations. This slowly became less and less the case, especially by the mid-17th century as the Speaker came to be seen as more responsible to his fellow MPs than the crown. When the title was used in 1787 for the presiding officer of the US House of Representatives, who had no king to have to report to, it became artifactual.
  • One of the main purposes of the Speaker used to be that you could talk while "addressing the Speaker" and thus reduce the risk of offending the other members of Parliament — now a much less pressing concern, but tradition kept it around. Given that the Speaker in his traditional role had to often act as the Bearer of Bad News the tradition of 'dragging' the newly elected Speaker from their seat in the Commons to their new office becomes understandable and well, nowadays it's just one of those silly traditions the Brits love so much.
• The Optical Media Board in the Philippines, notorious for conducting raids on street stalls selling bootleg DVDs of pirated films, is starting to become this, as use of its namesake has declined in favour of solid-state flash storage, digital downloads and cloud-based services. They were formerly known as the Videogram Regulatory Board back when they were first established in 1987, but as to whether they would change their name to the Digital Media Board is yet to be determined.
• The term 'ticket' in politics, referring to a party's collective group of candidates in a specific election, is a reference to the antiquated electoral method of having the voter choose a party ticket pre-filled with all of their nominees and placing it in the ballot box. This practice has completely died off, but the use of the term persists, most commonly to refer to the joint President and Vice President choice in US national elections.
• In 1989, the European Union established the PHARE program to prepare candidate countries for accession in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The name (also meaning 'lighthouse' in French) stood for Poland and Hungary: Assistance for Restructuring their Economies, and the name stuck even though the program quickly expanded to encompass 13 countries at its peak.
• Dave Leip's Atlas of US Presidential Elections, one of the oldest online election databases, also covers Congress, Senate and Gubernatorial elections, including during midterms.
• The term "by-election" stems from the Old Norse word bȳr ('town'), even though by-elections can occur at all levels of government. Averted in the US, where such an election is known as a "special election".
• In the U.S., most states have a Department of State that handles various in-state government duties. The federal government's Department of State, by contrast, is responsible for international relations, making it equivalent to another country's ministry of foreign affairs. It actually originated in 1789 as the Department of Foreign Affairs, but had its name changed only a few months later when it was assigned additional, domestic duties such as managing the mint and the census (which are now handled by the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Commerce, respectively).
• The Railroad Commission of Texas is in charge of regulating the state’s oil and gas industry, and has nothing to do with railroads at all. It used to, but the last of the agency’s railroad-related authority was transferred to the state Department of Transportation in 2005.

Others

• 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, 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.
• Pabst Breweries renamed its flagship beer Pabst Blue Ribbon in the early 1950s after it won a tasting contest^note (at the 1893 Worlds Fair). Very few drinkers today remember this.^note (And it sort of deepens the ironic-hipster cachet the brand has gained, since few of those people would imagine it winning any tasting contests today.)
• 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 hasn't been a box chilled by ice brought by the iceman in many decades. It still makes sense though, given how a typical refrigerator can keep ice anyway.
• 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.
• "Freelancing", or doing work in a field on a per-project contract basis rather than as a regular employee of a company, comes from the Middle Ages, when soldiers were metonymized as "lances" and thus a mercenary was a "free lance", attached to no particular liege lord or army.
• Pencil "leads" are made of graphite. They aren't, and never have been, made of lead. The stylus, a writing implement used by the Romans to inscribe characters in wax, did consist of a lead rod with a point, however, and that's the reason we still use the term to this day. As a result, many young schoolchildren fear 'lead' poisoning should they prick themselves with a sharpened pencil — even though graphite, being pure carbon, is harmless.
  • In addition, high-quality graphite resembles galena and other lead ores, causing confusion in the 17th century when graphite's use in writing implements began.
  • 'Pen' (etymology unrelated to 'pencil') is an archaic word for feather (from Latin penna), harking back to the time when bird feathers were dipped in ink and used to write.
• The third generation of the Boeing 737, officially known as the 737 Next Generation or 737NG for short. 15 years after entering service, it was still referred to as such, even in promotional material for its upcoming successor, the 737MAX.
• Since Mercurochrome, that bright red-orange antiseptic many a schoolchild from the mid-to-late 20th century would fondly remember, contained mercury compounds, it was no longer certified as safe in the States and several other countries. But the brand is still widely recognised enough that some companies made In Name Only, "mercury-free" formulations using benzalkonium chloride or iodine as its active ingredient.
• Baygon, a pesticide brand popular in Asia, Australia and Latin America, became this when SC Johnson acquired the line from Bayer in 2003. The 'Bay' in Baygon originally stood for Bayer, though it still makes sense as the German chemical firm still manufactures the active ingredients used in Baygon products and supplies them not just to SC Johnson but to other companies as well.
• Before photocopy technology, the only way to send copies of one letter to additional people was to have it carbon copied. Actual carbon copying for this purpose is obsolete (it's still used in some service industries to write out notes and provide one copy to the customer and one for the company to keep), 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" takes up very little space and lets you take more people.
• Similarly, any technological design data is called "blueprints", referring to a copying technology which largely fell out of use in the mid-20th century.
• Sanitary napkins (sanitary towels to UK readers) are still commonly sold and referred to as "maxi pads" 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).
  • Though some places still make "mini pads", they're now often called liners instead.
• 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.
  • In languages other than English, however, they are known as Röntgen Rays, but it probably won't catch on in English because X-ray sounds cooler.
  • The entire field of radiology counts as this. Its name comes from the radiation used to make X-rays, but the field now covers all sorts of medical imaging technologies, not all of which involve radiation, such as ultrasounds, which use sound waves, and MRIs, which use magnetism.
• 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 II, only the more popular chocolate piece was kept due to restrictions on sugar at the time, and has remained that way since.
• Paging someone originally meant sending a pageboy out to find them and deliver a message or summons. This rarely happens 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.
• 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.
• MI5 and MI6 were named because they were the fifth and sixth branch of the UK's Directorate of Military Intelligence (hence the "MI"), which went from MI1 all the way up to MI19. Today all of the other sections have been disbanded or were absorbed into other organizations; and MI6 is now officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service and MI5 as the Security Service.
• 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 (and is still responsible for cracking down on counterfeiters), a sizable portion of Secret Service agents are highly visible security enforcers who aren't exactly very secretive about what they do.
• The U.S. federal public health agency, known as the CDC, is in full the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was founded in 1948 as the Communicable Disease Center, later the National Communicable Disease Center, the Center for Disease Control, and the Centers for Disease Control (this last change came once the agency established its current model of multiple constituent centers). In 1992, the current name was adopted, but the legislation that established the name specified that the "CDC" initialism would remain, making the Artifact Acronym an enforced trope.
• Have you ever wondered why the doctorate degree title for all scientific disciplines is called a Ph.D., i.e. Doctor of Philosophy, even though almost no 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 one and the same thing. (It was not until the so-called Age of Enlightenment that these disciplines were separated, but the title of the doctorate remained, at least in most English-speaking countries.)
  • The word 'philosophy' comes from philos ('love') and sophos ('wisdom'), with no specific connotations on the actual field of study; as various branches of knowledge came up with more descriptive terms for themselves, what we now call "philosophy" took over the generic term.
• 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.
• Few if any members of the Teamsters 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 International Brotherhood of Teamsters is itself a bit of an example. Their core membership is still made up of logistical and transport workers and the like, but they are also known for accepting just about any profession that wasn't already represented by another union.
  • Similarly many members of the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Reinforcing and Ornamental Iron Workers, often just referred to in the US as the Ironworkers' union, actually work with steel these days. Though iron is still the primary component of steel.
  • American unions tend to be quite guilty of scope creep, though it usually doesn't overwhelm the original class of workers from the name (e.g., the United Auto Workers are still mostly car factory workers, notwithstanding the union's efforts to branch out into representing grad students, government lawyers, and other professionals and service workers). But one that has is the National Conference of Firemen and Oilers, who not only now accept a wide range of professions thanks to them becoming an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, but it keeps its name despite both firemen and oilers becoming obsolete as a profession in most industries.
• 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.
  • This is becoming less of an artifact as many cars now come with a properly-titled keyless ignition, where the car is started by pressing a button and thus there is no physical key at all. The buttons are once again on a key fob. There is a key that is stored in the key fob for unlocking the door if the battery dies, but it can be removed and is rarely used.
• Car dashboards inherited their name from a front portion of the vehicles hitched to horses in pre-automotive days, placed there to keep any mud or dirt dashed up from the animals' hooves from getting onto the driver and passengers.
• "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. While terms for other planets do exist (like "areology" for Mars), they are rather obscure.
• Although it's not completely archaic yet, in the US, you still hear drivers refer to a "service station" where they get gas. That's because, except for New Jersey, which prohibits self-service gas (and, to some extent, Oregon), very few such establishments have garage or repair facilities anymore, 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.
• Using "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.
• 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 research doctorates and some master's 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 term "Vtuber" is short for "Virtual Youtuber". While the phenomenon of Vtubers originated from YouTube, however, they are no longer limited to YouTube and can be found on any streaming platform, from Twitch to Nico Nico Douga.
• The months September, October, November and December came from the Roman calendar, where they were in the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th positions respectively; the time between the end of December and the beginning of March was (according to tradition anyway) originally not assigned to any month, but eventually January and February were created as the 11th and 12th months to reduce administrative headache. (Tradition attributes this change to the legendary or semi-legendary second King of Rome, Numa Pompulius.) Sometime around the second century BCE, the civil year (when the consuls and other elected magistrates took office) was shifted to the beginning of January rather than March; this apparently tracked an earlier change in how religious festivals were reckoned, and also gave the military magistrates (particularly the consuls) time to get situated before the campaign season began in the spring. When the Romans adopted the Julian calendar, the January reckoning stuck, and it still remains in the Julian-derived Gregorian calendar we use to this day. (This is also why Leap Day is at the end of February; it used to be added here at what was the end of the year, not the end of the second month.)
• Many US people, particularly older ones, kept referring to manual transmissions in vehicles as "standards" long after automatic transmission became the norm there.
  • "Standard shift" originally referred to a specific type of three-speed manual with column shift (later referred to "three on the tree" as a retronym from "four on the floor") and the specific pattern of 1-toward you and down, 2-dogleg up and away, 3-straight down from 2nd, R-toward you and up. All manual transmissions since the early '80s are floor-shift with 5 or 6 speeds as of the early 2010s.
• Aircraft "black box" flight data recorders are usually orange these days — so as to better find them among the wreckage if the plane crashes. In fact, they were originally named for their pitch black interiors, since they used photographic film.^note (Compare to a "dark room" where pre-digital photographs were developed.) Although, by sheer coincidence their nature means they fit a completely different definition of the same term; since they're designed to be tamper-proof they're black boxes in the engineering sense.
• 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 US states of New York and New Jersey have a couple of bistate agencies that have increasingly stretched their nominal ambits enough to qualify for this trope:
  • The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was originally created in 1921 to bring all the port facilities in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Newark and Elizabeth under the same management, smoothing over the disputes between the two states that the Interstate Commerce Commission had gotten sick of arbitrating. At the time of its establishment, it was known simply as the Port of New York Authority, despite having jurisdiction over New Jersey's ports as well (it was named for New York Harbor, which is so called despite also bounding New Jersey) –- thus inverting the trope.
    
    Because it had jurisdiction over the Hudson River, it was also supposed to build bridges and tunnels, which it has, and collect tolls from them to pay off its debts. It sort makes sense in allowing transshipments between port facilities. Then after World War II it took over all three airports, and built a bus terminal in midtown Manhattan near the Lincoln Tunnel. OK, that's still related to transportation. And later it took over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad under the river between the states. Same deal.
    
    During the 1960s, the rise of container shipping radically changed the port's economic balance. Containers were handled across the river, in Newark and Elizabeth, where there was plenty of open land to store empty containers, convenient connections to nearby Newark Airport, rail lines, and the New Jersey Turnpike between the port and the airport. Meanwhile, the city's aging docks, hard for trucks to get to and plagued by corruption, were caught flatfooted by the new technology. Ironically, when the Port Authority changed its name in the mid-1960s to include the "and New Jersey", less and less shipping every year was going through the city... making this a double inversion of the trope, at least in the geographic sense.
    
    But helping build the World Trade Center was only tangentially related to port facilities, and widely questioned. In the 21st century, the name has finally become fully geographically artifactual, with the agency's takeover of Stewart Airport, outside of Newburgh in the Hudson Valley, and Atlantic City Airport — both of them a long way from New York City's ports.
  • Similarly, the Palisades Interstate Park Commission was created around the same to manage the park of that name along the stone cliffs that abut the Hudson across from Upper Manhattan into Rockland County, in both states, and the parkway that connected them. But the parkway was eventually completed all the way to Bear Mountain, about 20 miles north of the nearest point in New Jersey, and it made sense for the PIPC to have jurisdiction over Bear Mountain and Harriman State Parks as well, even though those are entirely within New York. It has since been given responsibility for other state parks and historic sites in Orange and Ulster counties in New York, even further away from Palisades Park and New Jersey.
• The New York State Thruway Authority mainly manages that toll highway and its branches — in Buffalo, the Berkshires and a short connector to the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey. It also got control over the section of Interstate 95 through Westchester County between the Bronx and Connecticut, known as the New England Thruway, so the name still held. But in the mid-1990s a one-time budget move gave it control over Interstate 287, Westchester's Cross County Expressway, between the New England Thruway and its main section. It couldn't charge tolls on it under federal law, and didn't rename it or change its own name. In another year at the same time a similar budgetary move by the state (since reversed) gave the Thruway the entirety of Interstate 84 in New York, which has an interchange with the Thruway main line between Pennsylvania and Connecticut. So it's managing roads beyond the Thruway.
• And in New Jersey, we have the New Jersey Turnpike Authority — which since 2003 has operated the Garden State Parkway in addition to its eponymous toll highway.
  • Before 2003, the Parkway was operated by the New Jersey Highway Authority, whose name wouldn't have suggested that they also ran the Garden State Arts Center, a concert venue accessible only from the highway in Holmdel. It's now PNC Bank Arts Center — still owned by the NJ Turnpike Authority.
• This can even apply to private nonprofit organizations in the two states. The New York/New Jersey Trail Conference is the main umbrella organization for hikers in the metropolitan area. Its maps and guidebooks, however, cover areas in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania that border on New York and New Jersey.
• Elsewhere in the Northeast, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Public Transportation Authority (SEPTA) operates commuter rail service to stations in Delaware and New Jersey.^note (The West Trenton, NJ, station is particularly interesting as unlike the DE stations, which are subsidized by that state's public-transit agency, DART, and thus bear its graphics along with SEPTA's, it does not overlap with any NJ Transit lines and thus has entirely SEPTA signage and graphics, giving no acknowledgement that it's actually across the Delaware River.)
• The Canadian national law enforcement agency still known as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police fits this Trope; they haven't used horses for a long time (except for the occasional ceremony).
• A common term for a marked police cruiser is a "black and white" (in Britain, the term "panda car" is similarly used) whether or not those are its actual colors (NYPD cruisers are white with blue stripes, for example).
  • Significantly, in The Blues Brothers, the retired squad car known as the "Bluesmobile", was in fact black and white, while most if not all of the myriad police cruisers that pursued them throughout the film were not.
• In North America, "blue" is used in work titles and phrases like "blue lives matter" as a metonym for the police. While many do wear blue uniforms^note (firefighters also wear blue, too), some agencies outfit their officers in olive drab, brown, khaki, or even gray.
• 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, the Latin word for sodium (which in turn came from the Ancient Greek nátrio).
  • 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 (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.
  • Even more overtly, many "nightclubs" now open during the daytime.
  • This might have been a relic of an era similar to what was until recently true in the US state of Utah. Under its famously restrictive liquor laws, bars as such were not allowed. Instead, they were all "private clubs" that allowed anyone of legal age to be a "member" for a night as long as they'd paid their dues (don't call it a cover!). The laws were changed in 2009 to be more in line with the rest of the country.
• Most infants' rubber pants are now made of plastic.
• 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 US 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. As Rational Wiki puts it, "The irony of the organization being originally founded to get us to move on from Clinton's improprieties now constantly reminding people of those improprieties every time they see its name seems to be lost on them".
• 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.
• Similar to Northwestern University and the "Pacific Northwest", the West National Reporter System is a collection of legal case decisions that dates back to 1876, before the United States did much of its western expansion. Now, "West" has nothing to do with this; the reporters are the product of the West publishing company, named after its founder, John B. West. The artifactual nature of the reporters is this: West produces/has produced six reporters of federal cases^note These are: (1) the Supreme Court Reporter (which contains decisions of the US Supreme Court, which are inherently binding on every other court), (2) the Federal Cases (pre-1880 federal district court decisions) (3) the Federal Reporter (in three series) (decisions of the US Courts of Appeals), (3) the Federal Supplement (in three series) ("reported" — that is, deemed by the judge to have some precedential value rather than being boilerplate judicial busywork — federal district court decisions since 1880), (4) the Federal Rules Decisions ("unreported" federal district court decisions with bearing on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, Appellate Procedure, or Evidence, and therefore treated as persuasive but not binding precedent), (5) the Bankruptcy Reporter ("reported" decisions of the US Bankruptcy Courts, basically the equivalent of the Federal Reporter but for bankruptcy issues), and (6) the Federal Appendix ("unreported" decisions of the US Courts of Appeals). and seven regional reporters of state court cases. The regional level features five directional names (ex. Southern Reporter) and two oceanic ones (ex. Atlantic Reporter). The only one accurately named today is the Southern, with possibly the Atlantic^note Which does not include all of the states bordering the Atlantic, but all of the states covered do have Atlantic coastlines, except for Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC, but of those Pennsylvania and DC have frontage on major Atlantic estuaries and Vermont is part of New England, traditionally associated with the Atlantic. and South Eastern^note Four of its five covered states — Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia — are indisputably part of the Southeast, and while West Virginia isn't so clear-cut, it's borderline. Of course, it doesn't include the southeasternmost state — Florida — which is part of the Southern Reporter. Reporters also getting a pass. For example, Illinois cases are in the North Eastern Reporter, which is fine (Illinois is definitely Northern, and while it's not traditionally though of as part of "the Northeast", it is at the very least east of the Mississippi and thus roughly in the northeastern quarter of the country), until you learn that Michigan cases are in the North Western Reporter. Nearly all of Michigan is very clearly east of Illinois.^note Very technically, the westernmost third of the Upper Peninsula is directly north of Illinois — but hardly anybody lives in the westernmost third of the Upper Peninsula, and of course two-thirds of the Upper Peninsula and the entire (larger and far more populous) Lower Peninsula are all east of every part of Illinois. Other modern-day headscratchers are Kentucky and Tennessee in the South Western Reporter and Kansas and Oklahoma in the Pacific Reporter, of which the former didn't make sense even then (the reason is that the Pacific was a catch-all, which is why the 1907 admittee Oklahoma ended up there). If you're so inclined, take a look at the map◊.
  • Inverted by the United States Reports, the official case reporting series of the US Supreme Court. The series was created by taking over a recently started series and renaming it; however the initial volumes remain for continuity's sake. All the cases in the first volume, and the first few in the second, are Pennsylvania appellate cases which predate the establishment of the Supreme Court.
• The March of Dimes Foundation was a private charity founded by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938 to combat polio by enlisting people to solicit small donations (aka "dimes") door to door (the "march"). The funds raised both cared for afflicted persons and funded research into a vaccine, which was accomplished in 1955. With the disease all but eradicated the organization decided to refocus their mission on birth defects (and more recently, prematurity), instead of disbanding. Ignoring the lost connection to polio the name now exists an artifact since the donation amount was never indexed to inflation and the method of collecting donations door to door by local chapters has largely been replaced.
  • Its namesake, The March of Time (MoT) series of radio, newsreel and television documentaries (produced by the owners of Time magazine), has long disappeared from either airwaves or movie theaters. The last MoT radio show was in 1945, the last MoT newsreel in 1951, and the last MoT TV documentary in 1966.
• The Russian government's official news agency is called Itar-Tass—an acronym for two agencies that were combined early in the Soviet era. The 'T's stand for 'telegraph' and the 'SS' in Tass is from the Russian term for the Soviet Union — making its name refer to a technology no longer used for disseminating information and a country that no longer exists.
• Both the London Underground and the New York City Subway, the two largest such transit systems in the world, have plenty of stations and lines that run aboveground (and, in outlying regions, are actually elevated above said ground). This is because both systems began life as different private rail companies that all went bust and were consolidated under government ownership^note In London it was because there were just too many rail companies going after the same pie and no one could get a slice big enough to actually feed themselves, in New York it was two companies basically forced into insolvency by the city (by doing things like not allowing them to raise fares, which the city regulated) because they wanted to take complete control of the city's rail, many of which predated any subway construction (there's parts of the NYC Subway that date back to the 1880's even though it technically opened in 1904). In the case of New York many of these above-ground lines have been planned to be replaced at various points, but New York is also famous for running face first into Development Hell for transit projects, so very few of those plans ever came to fruition.
  • Then London had to really confuse things by creating the London Overground as well, which does feature underground sections for those keeping score.
  • The "L" in Chicago L is for "elevated" and while most of it is indeed elevated above ground there are sections of it that are built like a traditional subway. More uniquely, the "L" also has segments at ground level and even multiple grade crossings (i.e. places it crosses a street at ground level, needing lights and a gate to keep cars, bikes, and pedestrians from entering the tracks and getting flattened).
  • This sort of thing is common around the world, for example Canada has the Toronto Subway (mostly underground but has at-grade and elevated lines) and the Vancouver Sky Train (mostly elevated but runs underground through Vancouver's downtown.)
• The London Underground in general, first established in 1863, has many examples of this:
  • The "Underground" bit is a well known artifact (as is the network's popular nickname, the 'Tube', after the shape of the tunnels that some but by no means all of its tracks run within), but even "London" can be disputed as well: 14 London Underground stations are located outside Greater London.
  • Most of the lines on the network take their names from the railway companies that originally built them (the Northern, Metropolitan, District, Central and Piccadilly). The Bakerloo line got its name from a nickname given to the fact that it originally ran between Baker Street and Waterloo, which it has since expanded beyond in both directions, and the Waterloo & City line takes its name from when its operating company referred to what is now Bank station as 'City'.
  • The Circle Line is now more like the Tight Spiral Line, as it has terminals.
  • The famous 'Tube map' now includes the Overground, Docklands Light Railway (DLR), trams and a cable car.
  • The DLR has grown far beyond the Docklands.
  • In June 2015, Heathrow Airport's 1960s-built Terminal 1 was closed. In January 2016, its Underground station was renamed "Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3" on the Tube maps. Despite this, the train announcements and destination boards still refer to it as "Heathrow Terminals 1, 2 & 3".
• Conversely, the Hamburg Hochbahn (roughly Hamburg elevated railway) which runs the Hamburg U-Bahn has below-ground and at-grade sections. And to make it even more complicated, the corporate entity now holds shares in other railways totally unrelated to Hamburg or subways.
• The Moscow Metro has a station called Aeroport — literally 'airport'. The name has been wildly misleading since the late 40s, when the Khodynka Aerodrome (now defunct) ceased to be used as a civil airport. No one has bothered to fix this.
• The US's National Rifle Association, founded after the Civil War to promote improved rifle marksmanship, now includes and advocates the interests of owners of all types of firearms, including pistols and shotguns. And while the NRA remains involved in marksmanship training, its main focus has shifted to political advocacy of gun rights.
• In the Middle Ages, in England, 'High Treason' referred to treason against the King and/or the State and 'Petty Treason' (from the French petit, 'small') to treason against a lawful superior^note (a wife killing her husband — but not the other way around — or a clergyman killing his prelate, a servant killing his master or mistress, or his master's wife; before 1351, a wife attempting to kill her husband, a servant forging his master's seal, a servant committing adultery with his master's wife or daughter and counterfeiting gold or silver coin also counted). With the merging of the offences of petty treason and murder, the title of the offence of 'high' treason became an Artifact Title.
  • Averted in Canada where there is the offense of treason (discretionary life sentence) and high treason (mandatory life sentence) refers to aggravated cases of treason.
• In its final years at the Turn of the Millennium, the long-running Las Vegas show Splash had this. The title originally referred to its aquacade centerpiece, which used a tank that held about a dozen swimmers. Not long after Cirque du Soleil's much larger-scale "O" opened down the street, the tank and swimmers were dropped in favor of an ice rink; The Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas not only pointed out the reason for the change, but how silly it was to retain the original title "even though there's nothing left to splash".
• AARP originally stood for for the American Association of Retired Persons. These days, membership consists of pretty much everybody over the age of 50, while retirement usually doesn't start until 65, and retired people under 50 aren't allowed to join. Thus, the AARP has officially discontinued use of the full name.
• People still refer to those they pay rent to for space they use as "landlords" even though in many cases no actual land is involved (often just sections of a building whose underlying land is never rented) and are often not only not even titled aristocrats (the term persists even in nations where an official aristocracy never existed) but aren't even individual people.
• The subdivisions of some court systems, usually appellate ones, are in some jurisdictions called "circuits". This comes from an earlier era when the judges on the circuit, along with their support staff and even some lawyers, would travel together once or twice a year to the various courts over which they had appellate jurisdiction (usually in a geographically defined area) and hear whatever cases had been appealed to them. Nowadays, they still sometimes travel to the courts to hear cases, but as often as not the lawyers arguing the case go to the court's main building and there is no 'circuit', as in a predefined itinerary, anymore.
  • This use of "circuit" is especially artifactual when applied to some of the circuits of the US Court of Appeals. The District of Columbia Circuit hardly needs to travel, and the Federal Circuit (also based in DC) has subject-matter jurisdiction rather than geographical jurisdiction so it doesn't need to travel.^note (In fact, judges of the Federal Circuit are required by federal law to live no more than 50 miles (80 km) from DC.)
• Some US states and DC have retained the name "Superior Court" for a trial court of general jurisdiction even after consolidating all of the inferior courts into the Superior Court. Also, New York now has two levels of state courts above the state Supreme Court, namely, the Court of Appeals and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, and the jurisdiction of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals has grown so much that that court is now effectively Maryland's court of ordinary appeals.
• People still call the shiny silvery metallic stuff they wrap things in "tinfoil", even though it's been made of alumin[i]um for at least a generation.
• A cable company will often refer to the converter box they provide as a "set-top box", since they were typically placed atop the TV set upon installation. The flat-panel TVs commonplace today are too thin to put a cable box (or virtually anything) on top of.
• The style of beer known as India Pale Ale, usually abbreviated to IPA, was invented by a Liverpool brewery supposedly to withstand the long sea voyage to India. It's made and consumed all over the world now, sometimes in the same place it's brewed.
  • In a twist of this, IPAs brewed in America are becoming quite popular in Britain now. They can often be distinguished by being redder in colour. This means that British manufacturers in turn are coming up with "American Style" India Pale Ales.
  • Furthermore, some American breweries produce India Pale Lagers — by now "India Pale" is just a synonym for 'highly hopped'.
• Copying documents and designs with cyanotype technology is something that went out of wide use over half a century ago. The word "blueprint" doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
• Frozen hot chocolate is actually a fairly popular drink in many places, and it's famously served at New York's Serendipity 3 restaurant, where it's considered the highlight of the menu. Obviously, it's not really accurate to call the stuff "hot" chocolate if it's frozen, but calling it "frozen chocolate" would be even more misleading, so...
  • Then again, chocolate itself is etymologically this, with most proposed etymologies having it derive from the Aztec Nahuatl word xococ meaning bitter or chokol meaning 'hot' and atl meaning 'water'. Chocolate originally referred only to a drink but now it generally means a solid. So we have frozen hot "hot water" which can't be called frozen "hot water" because that would imply it's a frozen solid.
• Some older people (including Peter Griffin, on a Family Guy episode) still refer to TV remote controls as "clickers". This derives from the battery-free technology that made them possible in the mid-1950s when they were introduced; bars inside the remote made an audible clicking sound on a certain frequency that the TV recognized as commanding a certain action, usually just on/off or a channel change. This technology was displaced by infrared-based remotes in the 1980s. Even so, "clicker" is still a better-sounding name from a grammatical point of view because "clicker" describes an actual object, whereas "remote control" is an abstract compound noun (and "remote" is a repurposed adjective, which is even worse). But most people still call it a "remote-control" or a "remote" — or, in some regions, a "channel-changer".
• Older commentators and some diehard fans still sometimes refer to the top part of ice hockey uniforms as a "sweater". Years ago, when all hockey was played on ice outside, they were indeed made of material that could and did keep you warm. Nowadays, with many games played indoors, they're usually made of light mesh and are more deserving of being called "jerseys".
  • And the use of "jersey" to denote a garment worn by a player in an organized sport came from the early use of knitted sweaters known as jerseys for that purpose, making this a Recursive Adaptation.
    • The name for this time of garment originally comes from the island of Jersey in The Channel Islands. Its neighbouring island Guernsey meanwhile lent its name to a similar sweater — as with "jersey", "guernsey" survives as a generic name for a type of sports apparel, but is only used in one sport: Australian Rules Football, where it is the unusual sleeveless form of jersey worn by the players.
• The first portable backcountry toilets, the kind used on most multiday guided river-rafting trips or similar expeditions, had no seats, soon earning them the name "groovers" for the marks their rims left on the buttocks and rear thighs of anyone using them. Seats were soon added, but the name has stayed.
• While all US states have a State Police with statewide jurisdiction, in 18 states it's known as the [State Name] Highway Patrol, even though their officers and employees do a lot more than enforce traffic laws and respond to disabled vehicles—they investigate major crimes in areas well off the roads that do not have adequate police forces of their own, conduct background checks on high-level government employees and process forensic evidence.
  • And many states, the local offices of the state police or highway patrol are still referred to both inside and outside the organizations as "barracks", even though troopers no longer live there.
• Scientology's Sea Org used to be tasked with staffing the church's yachts. Today it has some land-based functions as well, although members continue to wear naval-inspired uniforms to work.
• NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory deals almost exclusively with outer space and rocketry. This is because when it was founded in 1936, the term "Jet" Propulsion referred to all forms of non-propeller aerospace engines, not just gas turbine-based jets as later became the case.
  • In addition, while turbojets were being actively researched in the 1930s, at the time any talk of manned or even guided rockets brought up images of Buck Rogers and other childish fantasies –- not the best way to get money from the Army.
• "Ready salted" crisps, the UK version of plain or "original" potato chips. So called to distinguish them from the earliest unflavoured crisps, which in the 1920s an enterprising manufacturer Frank Smith started supplying with a small paper twist of salt inside the bag that the purchaser would use to season the contents to their own taste — which remained the standard practice until the 1950s. This now only exists in the form of Walker's Salt & Shake, a knowingly retro variety (until relatively recently still marketed under the Smith's brand) that still comes unsalted and with a small blue sachet of salt tucked inside for the customer to tip into the bag and shake up to coat the crisps.
• Drinks glasses are often made of plastic these days, though glass ones of course still exist.
• Planetary nebulae are not planets, nor sites of planetary formation, despite what Sir William Herschel may have thought when he coined the term. They're the ejected outer layers of old, low-to-intermediate-mass stars.
• Typefaces were originally distributed in the form of cast-metal letter blocks in the various sizes and faces. While they still could be done that way if the printer in question wants it, almost all type today is designed and distributed digitally. Yet the companies that develop and distribute them are still known as "foundries."
• "Upper case" for capital letters and "lower case" for normal ones comes from where they were kept in the printers' cabinets for that particular face.
• When was the last time you put gloves in a car's glove compartment?
• It's getting less common, but you still hear the standard Western men's formal matching business attire referred to as a "three-piece suit" even though third piece, the waistcoat or vest, hasn't been routinely worn since the 1980s at the very latest and now seems like a rather retrograde affectation.
• The US Geological Survey was created in 1879 to, as its name suggests, inventory public lands and their mineral resources. It's gone on to become best-known for its maps, which are pretty much the official maps of the entire country. And its responsibility and expertise now includes hydrological data as well.
  • In the same vein, the UK's counterpart in the mapping department, the Ordnance Survey, was established to make military maps for better use of artillery in Scotland after the Jacobite Rebellion. The Ordnance Survey was initially the responsibility of the Board of Ordnance, hence the name, and has kept it despite the Board of Ordnance's abolition in 1855 and the map's subsequent shift away from military purposes to largely civilian ones.
• The Lincoln County Process is a step in the production of almost all Tennessee whiskeys, in which the whiskey is filtered through (or steeped in) charcoal before being placed into barrels for aging. The process was named after Lincoln County, the location of many distilleries in the 19th century. However, over time, most of the distilleries closed, moved, or fell within the boundaries of Moore County (which was created in part from land that had been in Lincoln County). Today, none of the distilleries that use the Lincoln County Process are in Lincoln County. On top of that, the only distillery that's actually in Lincoln County doesn't use that process.
• In Saskatoon and other Western Canada cities, there was a touring trade Exhibition in the summer where farmers, inventors, artists, and traveling merchants would exhibit their products for other farmers and interested investors in the area. The Exhibition also featured a few carnival rides, games, and minor attractions to entertain the women and children. Nowadays, "The Ex" is all about the festival, rides, food, and games, and while the actual exhibition is still there, it's far from the central focus of the event.
• The Royal Dublin Society in Ireland after it ceased to be a Commonwealth nation and became a republic circa 1949.
• While the San Diego Comic-Con does still have an emphasis on comics, it's really a convention celebrating geek culture in general these days.
  • This is true for nearly every "geek convention" that happens anywhere. Whether it's advertised as a convention celebrating comics, movies, anime, video games or furries, you're almost guaranteed to find all of the above fandoms represented there.
    • The trope has been subverted by Louisville, which for most of this century has run a single event known as Fandomfest that encompasses all of the aforementioned fandoms and then some.
• When cars still largely used carburetors, BMW (among other brands) would stick extra badges and numerals onto their car's to indicate that it had a fuel-injected engine. BMW still adds the "i" badge for fuel injection to almost all their vehicles despite every passenger car in the US and most of Europe having been fuel injected for over two decades — the last carburetor-equipped passenger vehicle being the Jeep Grand Wagoneer running a 40-year-old AMC V8 engine in 1991.
  • However, the "i" badge is totally indicative for the company's electric vehicles, since i is the standard symbol that represents electric current in circuit diagrams. In badges, the distinction between "i" for fuel injection and "i" for electricity is the letter's placement within the model name—fuel-injected vehicles have the "i" at the end of the model name (such as the current 330i), while electric vehicles have the "i" at the start of the model name (such as the present-day i3 and i8).
• Automakers that make the car's engine displacement part of the model name have suffered heavily from artifact titles, namely BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Previously, if one had, say, a Mercedes C63, it would have a roughly 6.3 liter engine, give or take 0.1 liters. The 2015 model year C63? Four liters. Advancements in technology allow manufacturers to drop displacement (therefore increasing theoretical efficiency) and maintain the same power, but they refuse to change the name of the car model lest people think that it's slower because the numbers are smaller, and to maintain brand continuity.
• The day a buyer actually takes possession of a car is referred to as the "delivery date". This hearkens back to the early days of car dealerships, when they were usually storefronts downtown with a display model or two — and no other cars. After a buyer had negotiated the model they wanted and whatever customizations they wanted, the dealership would order the car to be shipped from the manufacturer via train.^note (Roads back then were not good enough to ship them by car carriers, which at any rate hadn't been developed yet.) Thus the "delivery date". Nowadays, with many dealerships having large lots with dozens of models and hundreds if not thousands of individual vehicles, most buyers are usually "delivering" their new cars to themselves.^note (Thus the commonly-heard phrase, in radio advertisements for car dealers, of "taking delivery from dealer stock" would have sounded ridiculous in the industry's early years.)
• The gallons by which fuel is priced in Britain are still referred to as Imperial gallons (to distinguish them from smaller US gallons), although the British Empire no longer exists and most of the former Imperial countries now use litres — as, indeed, do British fuel stations.
• "Concession stands" in sports/concert venues and movie theaters get their names from originally being concessions in the legal sense: the venue gave a third party the space within its property to operate their business (when movie theaters got tired of vendors selling stuff outside). While quite a few do still operate under that arrangement, the term is still used widely for snack bars (such as those at movie theaters today) that are operated by the venue itself.
• The Chinese Completely Different Title for the Jeep Cherokee is Ziyouguang, or "Light of Liberty". It comes from the fact that the Cherokee was named Jeep Liberty in the US for most of the 2000s, until 2012.
• This can sometimes happen with religions as well. Protestants started out as dissidents and protestors against aspects of the Catholic Church they objected to (specifically, the edicts issued by the 1529 Diet of Speyer condemning Martin Luther as a heretic). While many of them had serious conflicts with the Church, they never would've expected they'd be seen as starting their own denominations (there's a reason it was called the Protestant Reformation). And, in fact, many Protestant churches are pretty much the Christian establishment in their countries, the ones who get protested against.
  • By 1961, when the merger that led to the creation of the Unitarian Universalist Association happened, the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church already hadn't been based around the Christian theologies that had been their namesakes for a long time.^note (Unitarianism is the belief in a singular God instead of the Trinity, and Universalism is the belief in universal salvation for all after death.)
  • Conservative Judaism was split off from Reform Judaism in the early 20th century, as it wanted to conserve many of the traditions that were abandoned when Reform split from Orthodox. That being said, the movement has drifted very much leftward having more in common with the socially liberal Reform than the socially conservative Orthodox movement.
• The coarse gravel that rail tracks are usually laid on is called "ballast" because it was the same type of gravel stored in the holds of ships to ballast them, i.e. even their weight out.
• Likewise, overheated wheel bearings on North American railroads are still referred to as "hot boxes" even though the journal boxes from which the term comes have been out of use since the mid-20th century.
• The term "commuting" for your regular daily trip to and from work comes from some of the first rail passengers to use the train for that trip, back in late 19th-century Britain. They were so called because the railways offered them a "commuted" fare, a discount when they bought a week's or month's pass.^note (Nowadays that sense of the word survives only in the phrase for a reduced prison sentence.) The term evolved to become a reference to those who took that trip, and then was nounified into the trip itself. Today, most public transit services still provide discounted weekly/monthly fare and possibly other commuter deals, but the term doesn't really apply to people who drive themselves to work.^note (Although they sometimes get breaks on their tolls, if they're electronically collected.)
• Ships that depart, whether civilian or military, are still referred to as having "sailed", and their departure as their "sail time", about a century after the last commercial or military ships that used wind power in any way put into port for the last time.
• And we still generally refer to any transport of goods as "shipping", even if they're going overland.
• Starbucks Coffee's "Grande" size got its name because it was originally the largest size on their menu—and their "Tall" size got its name because the smallest size on their menu was originally called "Short". But they eventually started offering a larger size called "Venti" (Italian for "twenty", since it was twenty-six ounces) and dropped the "Short" size entirely.^note  You can still order some drinks in a "Short" size, but it's no longer listed on the menu This is why (somewhat infamously) the chain's "small" and "medium" sizes have names that technically both mean "large".
• As The Other Wiki states, the "punch list" of remaining undone items drawn up near the end of a construction project (at least in the US) gets its name from the original practice of punching a hole in the paper as the items are completed. You could still do it that way, but these days other, more conventional methods of recording the completed work are preferred.^note (Of course, quite a few people who work in construction would tell you that it could just as easily get its name from the shouting matches it often leads to between client and contractor/sub, or contractor and sub as the case may be, some of which have been known to come to blows.)
• The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in the early 1970s as a legal clinic to assist poor African-Americans in the South. Today it's better known for taking on racist hate groups like the Klan and monitoring their activities, sometimes well outside the South.
• The division of particles into leptons ("light particles"), baryons ("heavy particles") and mesons ("medium particles"). When the muon was discovered, it was initially classified as a meson (because it was heavier than the electron, and lighter than the proton or neutron); today it is known to be a heavier counterpart of the electron, and classified as a lepton. The tauon (also a lepton) and some mesons are in fact heavier than protons or neutrons. Nowadays, leptons are defined as fermionic elementary particles (spin 1/2) which do not strongly interact — i.e. electrons, muons, tauons, and neutrinos; mesons as particles consisting of a quark and an antiquark; and baryons as particles consisting of three quarks.
• Inverted by the US Interstate Commerce Commission. Despite its grandiose name, it was for most of its existence strictly a railroad focused agency.
• The Rally Dakar has not been held on even the same continent as Dakar since 2009. The 2008 edition (which would have been held in Africa) was canceled due to fear of terrorism, and has since moved to two other continents, first South America (2009–2019) and now Asia (2020–present, specifically in Saudi Arabia).
• In the US, casting a vote is still sometimes referred to as "pulling the lever", although those old-style lever voting machines have been gradually phased out as the 21st century has gotten underway and replaced by more modern electronic machines or at least paper ballots that one marks with a pen and then submits into a drop box or by mail; the last ones were used in New York in 2015.
• The building that houses the switching equipment for many telephone exchanges is referred to as the Central Office, from the days when the operators actually went to work there. Nowadays it's all automated and the only human presence is whenever maintenance people come in.
• A wooden pole in the ground with wires attached is typically called a "telephone pole" in the US, even though their primary purpose is to run electrical wiring. This is becoming increasingly artifactual today, as fewer and fewer people have landline telephones in their homes that would require such wiring.
  • In the UK, meanwhile, the wooden poles carrying telephone wires are still commonly referred to as telegraph poles.
• "Flaming" has come to modify "homosexual" and "gay" in the sense of 'extremely flamboyantly so' — leaving behind the extended metaphor that led it to be used first for "faggot", which literally means a bundle of sticks or brushwood that could be used for lighting fires.
  • In some cases now it's being used outside of the gay context, i.e. "flaming liberal".
• The word "plumbing" derives from the Latin word plumbum, which means lead (just look at a periodic table, where the element's symbol is Pb). In most developed countries no plumbing has been made out of lead in decades and even in the poorest countries no new lead pipes are laid.
• The "Mc10:35" is an Open Secret menu item at McDonald's consisting of an Egg McMuffin and McDouble put together. It was so named because the chain switches most restaurants from breakfast to lunch at 10:30 AM, thus meaning that it was only possible to get both items around 10:35 if any Egg McMuffins were left over from breakfast. However, ever since the chain began offering certain breakfast items all-day, including the Egg McMuffin, it is now possible to make a Mc10:35 anytime after 10:30 AM. Averted after March 2020 when McDonald's ditched all-day breakfast in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• This will inevably happen for languages if said language is used beyond the country/region they're named after. It's especially true if the number of speakers in other parts of the world greatly outnumbers the latter. Spanish and Portuguese, for examples, are far more widely spoken respectively in Brazil and Hispanic America (e.g. Mexico, Peru, Argentina, etc.) than in Spain and Portugual, to the point where number of speakers in the formers outnumber the populations in the latters nearly ten-to-one. Arabic has far more speakers outside of the Arabian Pennesula (even if they all can't understand each other). Meanwhile, English is seen by the majority of the world as something akin to a Common Tongue. With it being an official languages in nearly 60 country, and widely spoken even in countries where it isn't. And outside of Europe, and (to a lesser extent) South Asia, it's more associated with the United States and Australia, than it is with the UK.
  • Downplayed with French. Which, while spoken in many countries, is either a minority language or used primarily as a second language, with the majority of the language's native speakers still living in France proper.
• Several intergovernmental organizations with "Europe" in the name have had encounters with this trope:
  • In 1973, Denmark joined the European Union, or as it was known at the time the European Common Market. Along with Denmark came its large territory, Greenland, a large island/subcontinent on the North American continental shelf, inhabited largely by indigenous people linguistically and culturally related to the Inuit peoples of neighboring Arctic regions of Canada and the US, both of which are also long considered part of North America. Perhaps realizing this, and also upset about the impact some European fishing regulations would have on their livelihoods, Greenlanders voted to leave what had been renamed the European Economic Community in 1985, restoring the original aversion of the trope.
  • The Council of Europe includes as a member state Russia, whose most populous half is in eastern Europe but also stretches all the way to the northwestern Pacific coast, where it has borders with the US, Japan, North Korea and China — not European nations by any regard.
  • The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has been artifactual from its founding after the Helsinki Accords as it includes Iceland, Canada and the US as members, along with all the former USSR states.^note (Of the 15 ex-Soviet republics, only 6 are entirely in Europe — Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia — while 5 are entirely in Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan — and 4 straddle the loosely-defined border between Europe and Asia — Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.) It would be more accurate to call it the Organization for Security and Cooperation in the Upper Temperate Zones of the Northern Hemisphere.
• London's famous black taxicabs were traditionally called "hackney carriages" or "hackneys". The name originally referred to the horses bred around Hackney Village (now a borough of London), then shifted to referring to horse-drawn carriages available for hire. Of course, London's taxi fleet no longer includes any horses or horse-drawn vehicles.
• Oceanography started out, as its name would imply, as the mapping of the oceans, but has come to include the study of all aspects of the oceans, such as biology, geology and hydrology.
• L'eggs pantyhose were sold in plastic egg-shaped containers. Since 1991, they have been swapped out for ordinary cardboard boxes due to their wastefulness, arts and crafts projects notwithstanding. Now the Punny Name no longer makes sense.
• When Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School renamed into Ochanomizu University in 1949, it's no longer in the eponymous Ochanmizu, having moved to the Otsuka neighbourhood in 1932.The reason that name was chosen is that Otsuka is named after tombs (zuka) in that area, which is found inappropriate for an university.
• Urbana, a major Christian missions conference for college students currently held every 3 years, got its name from its longtime location of the main campus of the University of Illinois, divided between the cities of Champaign and Urbana.^note (Although the first edition was held in Toronto.) While the conference is still known as Urbana, it got too big for the Illinois campus, and has since moved twice, first to St. Louis in 2006 and then to Indianapolis in 2022 (the 2021 conference was a COVID-19 casualty).
• Many members of the highly exclusive Court of Master Sommeliers no longer work in restaurants managing and serving wine.
• The Club of Rome international think tank has been headquartered in Switzerland since 2008.
• The name 'pineapple' dates back to when 'apple' was a generic term for any kind of fruit (hence the 'apple' in the Garden of Eden). Pine cones were called 'pine apples' (two words) because they're the fruit of the pine tree^note (despite not being edible, they're the part of the plant that houses the seeds — the botanical definition of fruit); then when the tropical fruit was discovered, it was named the "pineapple" because it superficially resembles a pine cone. This name has stuck in English, even though most other European languages (besides Spanish and Portuguese) refer to them as ananas.
• To differentiate it from the original indoor court tennis it was derived from, the tennis we know today was named "lawn tennis"... which today, aside from Wimbledon, is for the most part played on hard courts rather than lawns.
• Ben & Jerry's still sells a popular ice cream mix named in honor of Stephen Colbert called "Stephen Colbert's AmeriCone Dream", which was first introduced in 2007. Nowadays, Colbert is just the host of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and it's been many, many years since he hosted the satirical political show The Colbert Report in character as a flag-waving patriot.
• Smartphones are a weird example. While they still function as phones, they're obviously a far cry from the telephones we had in the past and we use smartphones for a lot more than calling. And admit it, do you really use your phone primarily as a phone? It's kind of weird we call them that.
  • Early telephones came with physical bells that would ring when receiving an incoming call. These bells were phased out decades ago in favor of preprogrammed digital tones, but telephones are still said to "ring" when someone calls, even though modern phones can "ring" with any kind of noise (or song) the owner desires, and many people will say the phone is "ringing" even if it's set to vibrate, or even muted but they happen to notice someone trying to call. And no one has "dialed" a phone number since the old rotary models gave way to touch-tone keypads.
    • Also, the use of the phrase "hang up". The origins come from the two-piece telephones that you literally hung on the wall. Rotary dial phones still technically hung on the cradle, but still more or less sat on it rather than hanging. Now, the only thing you need to do to stop a call is to just hit a button, or tap or swipe something analagous to one on your screen, which effectively eradicates any remnants there were originally with the phrase "hang up".
• "Sneakers", a popular nickname for casual athletic shoes, comes from the fact that most shoes originally had hard leather or wooden soles and you could hear someone walking in them from a mile away. Athletic shoes with soft rubber soles were invented in the late 19th century and earned their nickname due to the shock-absorption giving the wearer a much quieter step. Sneakers eventually became the dominant shoe style for everyday wear, but the term's meaning became lost as rubber soles found use with other shoe types such as work boots and men's dress shoes. Nowadays only high heels, cowboy boots, and old-fashioned dress shoes still have hard soles and a loud clacking noise when walking.
• Standard time, as opposed to daylight saving time, in the United States. When the first post-World War II federal DST law took effect in 1967, daylight time was about half the year (from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October). Since then, the length of daylight time has been extended, making daylight time the real "standard" time used most of the year. Standard time just gets the title because the year starts under it.
• Skippy Peanut Butter was named for Skippy Skinner, a character in a comic strip that was discontinued in 1945.
• One of Japan's best-selling curry mix is the Vermont Curry. It is named like this as the manufacturer wanted to make a sweeter curry for children by adding honey and apples... and at the same time, Vermont native DC Jarvis's Folk Medicine became a bestseller, as well as the apple-cider-vinegar-and-honey concoction described in that book. It even got into a fad in Japan as well, and the manufacturer decided to associate its apple-and-honey curry with Jarvis's honegar.
• A number of diseases have names that reflect outdated theories about them. Malaria literally means 'bad air', a name given to the disease when it was believed to be caused by foul-smelling air. Typhus and typhoid fever have similar names because they were once believed to be variations of the same disease. Cholera's name derives from the Ancient Greek word for 'bile', a reference to the four-humor theory of medicine. And, of course, the common cold has that name due to the age-old belief that you can Catch Your Death of Cold.
• Gymnasiums originated from the Greek word gymnasion which means 'school for naked exercise'. However, most modern gyms forbid exercising in the nude and require users to wear clothes.
  • Furthermore, in modern Greek the word gymnasium is used to refer to middle school. This is quite possibly a reference to the buildings being used by the same age groups.
• Back in The '60s the UK ice lolly company Lyon's Maid had a licencing deal with Gerry Anderson, with various "futuristic" ice lollies being tied to Fireball XL5 (Zoom), Stingray (1964) (Sea Jet) and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (Orbit). Since these lollies mostly appealed to boys, they introduced the Fab with a Lady Penelope theme. Fab is still going, and the Thunderbirds connection is long forgotten, but the lolly is still named after the "F.A.B." callsign and Lady Penelope's Vanity License Plate FAB-1.
• A 'tarmac', in the sense of an airport's taxiways and runways, or a road in general, is not commonly made of tarmac — short for tarmacadam, a type of road construction in which layers of compacted crushed rocks (macadam, itself named for the 19th-century Scottish engineer who pioneered it, John McAdam) are bound by tar and sand. Asphalt concrete has largely superseded it.
• When homeopathy started, mainstream Western medicine was based on the Galenic principle of 'opposite cures opposite'. "Homeopathy" (meaning 'same therapy') replaced this with the 'like cures like' principle. Homeopaths logically enough dubbed the opposite-cures-opposite approach as "allopathy", meaning 'different therapy'. Homeopaths continue to refer to mainstream Western medicine as allopathy, as though their mainstream competitors were still in the thrall of Galen.
  • Interestingly, the term "allopathy" is now used by mainstream medicine in the US in a quite different context. Mainstream medical schools began calling themselves "allopathic" to distinguish themselves from osteopathic medical schools, based on a theory that illnesses could be diagnosed and treated by manipulation of joints and bones. This distinction still exists, although osteopathic medicine has long since moved to a science-based model, with limited training in joint and bone manipulation, and the MD and DO degrees are now considered fully equal in the US.
• Graham crackers are named after Sylvester Graham, who exhorted people to eat wholegrains as a digestive aid and for general health, and to refrain from indulgent food. The only flour in the original 19th-century graham crackers was made from coarsely-ground wholewheat and known as graham flour. Most modern graham crackers are heavily sweetened, have as their first ingredient the refined white flour that Graham despised, and contain just enough wholewheat to give them that mildly grainy texture people expect.
• In Greek, the word for university is panepistimio, which means 'place of all the sciences'. It was that way when they were first founded, but now they are divided by categories of subjects, thus rendering the name redundant.
  • In the same vein, a type of university is called polytechnio, which means 'place of arts and crafts'. They did teach arts and crafts when they were first founded, but now the subjects they specialize in are civil engineering, architecture, mechanology, electrology and other similar subjects. The actual crafts are actually taught in the TEIs, which stands for Technical Institute (works the same way in Greek).
  • Even so, TEIs is also kind of an Artifact Title, because they teach a huge variety of subjects such as agriculture, fashion design or antiquity conservation. Not all of them are technical.
• The US-based National Basketball Association (NBA) is obviously still a basketball association, but it's now an international organization. The league incorporated two teams in Canada when it expanded in 1995: the Toronto Raptors and the Vancouver Grizzlies. Though the Grizzlies have since moved to Memphis, the Raptors remain in Toronto — so the NBA still has teams in both the United States and Canada.
• The same holds true for the National Hockey League, but in reverse — it started out in 1917 as a purely Canadian league, with four teams. It expanded into the US in 1924 with the addition of the Boston Bruins, and a majority of the teams have been American since 1931. Today, 25 of the league's 32 teams are south of the border. The NHL headquarters moved from Montreal to New York City in 1989, though its operational offices are in Toronto.
• The 'water closet' in old style homes is now referred to as the 'bathroom', apparently because that's where the bathtub is. However, people "going to the bathroom" are now more likely to be using the toilet. In some cases, "going to the bathroom" doesn't always mean actually relieving yourself with a toilet. Furthermore, there are bathrooms that do not have a bathtub.
• The word "atom" comes from the Greek world atomos, which means 'uncuttable', and comes from the fact that atoms were originally theorized to be the very smallest form that matter could take, and impossible to divide any further. However, as everyone learns on the first day of chemistry class, science now knows this is not the case, as numerous subatomic particles have been discovered, with some of them (specifically neutrons, protons, and electrons) comprising atoms themselves. Atoms have also been observed splitting apart during nuclear reactions. However, given that in a very real sense, a substance ceases to be what it was when atoms are split or fused, the term still fits, if with the more refined meaning 'that which cannot be split without changing what it is' — but then that would arguably apply (to a lesser extent) also to molecules and things made out of plastic can be a single molecule that you can hold in your hand.
• Steamrollers and steam shovels haven't been powered by steam in decades, but they're still generally referred to by their old power source instead of by the more modern terms 'road roller' and 'power shovel'.
• The word 'mileage', referring to how far something has travelled, is commonly used even in countries that have completely switched to using metric scales for distance.
• Long-extinct creatures are often named in such a way that later discoveries render their names hopelessly inaccurate, but due to the way taxonomical nomenclature standards work they generally can't be changed.^note (Because changing the name would create confusion when reading older publications in which the older name is used, and avoiding this is considered more important than getting rid of a Non-Indicative Name.) Take Basilosaurus, 'king lizard' — initially believed to be some kind of sea serpent, it eventually turned out to be a kind of prehistoric whale.
• The Red Delicious apple, while undeniably red, is far more popular nowadays for its shelf life than for its flavor. But when this cultivar was first produced, back in 1880, it really was delicious compared to its competitors, enough to eventually become the single most produced apple cultivar in the US for 50 years.
• The powdered drink Ovaltine is a contraction of Ovomaltine, by which name it's still known in its native Switzerland, referring to its main ingredients, eggs and malt extract. So far, so good, but the formula sold in many places no longer contains eggs.
• The 'cola' in Coca-Cola's name (see 'Companies' above) was originally a reference to the kola nut used as the source of caffeine in the drink. Kola nuts, which are native to tropical Africa and whose name is spelled with a C in Latin, contain large amounts of caffeine and were traditionally snacked on as a stimulant. It's rare nowadays to find kola nut-sourced caffeine; most caffeine used as an additive is the byproduct extracted in the making of decaf coffee. And, outside of Coke itself, almost no colas have ever contained actual kola nut anything.
• Tin foil hats, which are commonly associated with Cloud Cuckoolander conspiracy theorists, are called as such as packaging metal foil was formerly made out of tin before it was replaced with aluminium, but the use of the term stuck even long after the use of tin was discontinued.
• The first vehicles called "station wagons" were horsedrawn wagons designed to move people and their luggage to and from railway stations. A typical family's station wagon of today is still perfectly suited for that purpose, but it's unlikely to be what they mostly use it for. And over the last few decades, the station wagon body type has almost completely disappeared, being first replaced by minivans and now by SUVs.
• The US term "pink slip" referring to a vehicle's certificate of title originates from the state of California originally printing vehicle titles on pink paper. Since California traditionally had more cars than any other state, the term spread throughout movies, music, and video games depicting car culture and racing. Today, you'll hear many people call the vehicle title a pink slip regardless of how pink it actually is.
• In academia, a typical assignment given by instructors to students is to "write" an essay or research paper, even though said papers are now usually typed up on a computer. Additionally, they are often given terms such as "written work" and the like. Similar, almost anyone known as a 'writer' is going to be doing almost all of said craft through the medium of typing, not the literal written word.
• Stuffing, a food typically made out of breadcrumbs and originally meant to be stuffed into meat (most often whole poultry), is usually now cooked as a separate side dish due to safety concerns — stuffing placed in the middle of a large bird such as turkey or chicken may absorb bacteria and not reach a temperature high enough to kill them. In older parlance, the same food cooked outside the animal is called "dressing", but nowadays, few people will insist on the distinction.
• In American English, "entrée" means the main course of a meal (typically the second of three courses), as opposed to an introductory course as its name would imply. This comes from the now-rare custom of the five-course meal, where the second dish served was still one of the earlier ones in the meal as opposed to being the central one. Somehow, the name stuck around even as the typical number of courses dropped and the second dish of a meal became the main one. Elsewhere in the world, the word means a starter.
• Some early sodas (in the sense of presweetened fizzy drinks) had baking soda and a mildly acidic ingredient added to form carbon dioxide bubbles. Nowadays, CO2 is just about always added directly to the drink under high pressure (a process called force carbonation), no sodium compound required.
• Neurological conditions often have names given to them before the condition was fully understood. For example, borderline personality disorder was named such based on the DSM's diagnostic criteria classifying people as either "neurotic" or "psychotic", with BPD being thought of as being neurotic on the borderline of becoming psychotic. Now that the DSM has expanded to include a greater variety of classifications, and BPD is treated as a personality or mood disorder as opposed to a psychotic disorder, the 'borderline' part of the name is borderline meaningless.
• In aviation, 'conventional' landing gear is the term for the taildragger arrangement with a small tailwheel. Based on the design of modern airplanes, large and small, it is far from conventional nowadays.
• 'Direct flights' refer to flights that don't fly directly between destinations without stopping (that would be a 'non-stop flight'). This is a holdover from the early days of commercial aviation, when airlines were keen to advertise the fact that a single aircraft could fly 'direct' between major airports, even with the occasional landing for fuel or passengers along the way. Today, that's the default expectation of the vast majority of commercial flights, with the 'direct flight' term becoming a misnomer in the process.
• Audio jacks are also referred to as 'phone connectors', reflecting their original use in telephone switchboards.
• Pinball machines haven't had pins in them since the 1930s. The earliest games had metal pins on the playfield; the ball bounced around these pins with the goal of landing in scoring pockets.
• For quite a long time, marshmallows were made from a species of mallow that grows in marshes. In almost all modern commercially-made marshmallows, the plant has been replaced with gelatin.
• The heating elements on electric or induction stovetops are still called 'burners', even though they don't actually burn anything like gas or oil stoves do.
• Mince pies are so-called because they originally contained chopped-up (minced) meat as well as fruit. In medieval "mincemeat" filling, the meat was seen as the main ingredient, and the fruit, alcohol and spices as seasonings, but gradually the proportion of the other ingredients increased. The use of meat in these traditional Christmas treats was largely phased out in the 19th century and was completely eliminated in the 20th century, but the terms "mince pie" and "mincemeat" stuck, and a few commercially-produced mincemeats still include a small amount of suet.
• The term "rolling down the windows" comes from that fact that on older cars, the windows were opened by rotating or "rolling" a hand-crank. Modern cars have electric switches and motors that control the windows, making the term obsolete.
• The word "holiday" is a portmanteau of "holy day", but the term has come to refer to any day (religious or not) of cultural, governmental, or totally frivolous significance as well.
• The Russian language still calls hairdressers with a word derived from the German for 'wig maker', even though it is highly uncommon for them to deal with wigs for any noticeable amount of time, much less make them.
• The Church of England has a Diocese of Sodor and Man. 'Man' refers to the Isle of Man, but unless you're a fan of The Railway Series (which invents an adjacent Isle of Sodor for its setting) then the 'Sodor' part is a bit confusing as there's no such place in real life. The name comes from the ancient Norwegian Kingdom of the Isles, which featured two regions known as Norðreyjar ('Northern Isles', today Orkney and Shetland) and Suðreyjar ('Southern Isles', today the Hebrides and the Isle of Man). Suðreyjar would eventually be anglicised as 'Sodor', but at some point the area covered by the Diocese of Sodor and Man shrank to just include the Isle of Man without changing the name.
• The Dutch ICM trains, known for their extremely distinctive front-end designs due to the need to accomodate a gangway connection between coupled units, are popularly known as the Koploper ('Frontrunner', but doubling as a pun with the word Doorloopkop, the Dutch word for gangway connections). The name became a bit of an artifact when the ICMs were modernised, as the gangway connections were removed to reduce maintenance costs.
• In Malay, the word for train is kereta api ('fire wagon', or more literally 'wagon fire'), an obvious reference to steam engines that makes less sense in the age of diesel and electric. In Indonesian, the word for train is commonly shortened to just the more fitting kereta, but in Malay kereta by itself is instead the word for a car.
  • Similarly in Japanese, the word "釜" (pot/kettle) still frequently shows up in the names and descriptions of train engines, even as that obviously doesn't make much sense in the context of electrics.
• In the era of steam, trains in Britain would use 'headcodes' as a way of allowing other railway users to identify the purpose of a train at a glance. The front of locomotives were fitted with four mounting points for lamps, and which of those mounting points were in-use designated the train's purpose. In the modern era, the headcode became a four-digit alphanumeric code that is unique to each service and allows for easy identification of trainsets for signallers. It was common for trains to display their codes on the front, making the 'headcode' name still relevant, but this was phased out over time. Headcodes are still used today, but are virtually never displayed on the 'head' of a train anymore.
• Since noodle-making machines were introduced into Japan in early twentieth century, there has been two types of sōmen (thin Japanese noodles often eaten cold): "normal" sōmen, which is way in a way not unlike pasta, being roller-cut from a piece of dough, and that of Tenobe—literally "hand-pulled"—sōmen, which at the time was indeed hand-pulled, but this process has been mechanized over time, such that most of the pulling is done by machines. However, this distinction continues to be useful such that manufacturers of tenobe sōmen don't hide this fact, because it doesn't change the fact that tenobe sōmen is still made by repetitively stretching and resting dough—and this 24-hour process stabilizes the gluten to the point that overcooking the noodle has little effect on its texture. In addition, the process continues to require a high level of human supervision.
• Still photography cameras that use interchangeable lenses are commonly referred to as DSLRs (an acronym for digital single-lens reflex camera), even though since the mid-2010s most manufacturers have phased out cameras with mirrored viewfinders (which is what a 'reflex' camera is referring to).
  • Maybe by the general public, but a photography buff will never refer to a camera as a DSLR unless it has a mirrored viewfinder. If an interchangeable-lens digital cameras has no mirrors, it's always referred to as "mirrorless"; several acronyms exist, with MILC^note (mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera) the most common.
• The eggplant received its name from early cultivars which were the approximate shape, size and colours of a chicken egg. The ones most common today are none of the three, generally being larger, more elongated and purple.
  • 'Eggplant', meanwhile, is only the fruit's name in US, Canadian and Australian English. In Britain, Ireland, France, Germany and the Netherlands it is known as aubergine, one of an extraordinary profusion of words for it in many languages that nowadays differ widely yet all share a root in the Arabic bāḏinjān. In Spanish it becomes alberenjena or berenjena, in Portuguese beringela or bringella, and through colonial shenanigans this spread to South Asia and South Africa as brinjal. And in West Indian English this ends up as brinjalle and thence, through folk-etymology, as 'brown-jolly'. Which describes something that is neither visibly brown nor appreciably jovial.
• In the UK, a car's annual roadworthiness test is known as an 'MOT test' or simply its 'MOT'. This derives from the former Ministry of Transport, which hasn't existed since 1970 — the current government department responsible for vehicles is known as the Department for Transport.
• A barber's primary job was originally shaving and trimming facial hair, which is why the word is derived from the Latin barba ('beard'). This made much more sense in a time before mass-produced razors existed, when a local barber was often the only person in a town or village who owned a blade fine enough to safely shave someone.^note (This is also why barbers were often responsible for performing minor surgical procedures throughout most of the Middle Ages: in areas without access to doctors, barbers were usually the only people with blades that could be used to safely drain infections and trim away necrotic flesh.) Nowadays, their primary job is providing regular haircuts, with shaving generally being a secondary service.
• The word 'role' (the acting term) is derived from roule, the French word for 'roll'. This is a holdover from the early days of theatre, when all of an actor's lines were usually written on a single roll of paper; due to the high cost of paper throughout the middle ages and most of the early modern era, playwrights seldom printed multiple full copies of a single play, and often didn't bother to fully print or publish them at all — since they were primarily intended to be watched, not read. For various reasons, this practice has long since ended (paper is much more affordable, plays and screenplays usually need to be pitched and workshopped long before they're actually produced, etc.), and every actor involved in a play or film generally gets a full copy of the script. Nonetheless, the term remains in common use today. The same goes for the word "part", since it refers to the fact that the actors received only the part of the script that they needed.
• 'Buccaneer' comes from a French word meaning 'user of a boucane' (Arawak word for a meat-smoking rack). It derives from the French boucaniers' origins as hunters who lived without permission in Hispaniola before the Spanish drove them out, whereupon they turned to piracy.
• Penknives got their name from being used to sharpen quills, which fell out of wide use as writing implements well over a century ago.
• Most "blackboards" are green instead of black nowadays. The same goes for the term "slate" since modern chalkboards are made from porcelain enamel instead of slate.
• The FBI named each of the 26 Mafia families after whomever their contemporary head was at the time of the 1963 Valachi hearings. The names also rarely change despite years of changing bosses in each family. Joe Massino attempted to change the Bonanno crime family's name to the Massino crime family because he was dismayed that family namesake Joe Bonanno wrote a tell-all book about his stint as a mafioso. It didn't catch on outside of the Mafia though, and the family is still referred to as the Bonanno crime family.
• Production of Newcastle Brown Ale was moved to Gateshead in 2005, which is right across the river from Newcastle and may not count as an artifact if you aren't too strict about city limits. It then moved to Tadcaster in 2007, 121 kilometers away, which absolutely does make it an artifact. Export versions of the beer are made in Zoeterwoude, The Netherlands, and under licence locally in the United States.
• "Black Friday," the day after the American holiday of Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November) is widely seen as the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season. But it is no longer strictly tied to the United States nor the day after Thanksgiving. Retailers in countries around the world now hold "Black Friday" sales despite not celebrating Thanksgiving, meaning that the following Friday signifies absolutely nothing. And within the US, companies have been starting "Black Friday" sales earlier in the month to try to alleviate the massive crowds on Friday (especially the stampede of shoppers right when the stores would open, which have killed people in years past). Some stores started the sales on Thanksgiving itself, but this was criticized by many for not letting the workers spend that day with their families. The Covid-19 pandemic forced retailers to Take a Third Option, and nowadays "Black Friday" sales start at various points in the month of November, sometimes as early as the first week, so that people don't have to crowd into the stores on that one day. But "November Holiday Sale" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
• The "colour-changing egg timer" is a gadget that you drop the water when boiling eggs, and which reacts to the heat in much the same way as the eggs do, telling you when they're soft, medium or hard. The whole point is that it's directly measuring something for which "after so many minutes they'll be like this" is only an approximation, but it's still called a "timer" because "colour-changing egg thermometer" doesn't really convey what it's for.

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 the word 'military' in common usage refers to the armed forces in general. However, initially it referred only to land forces; the word itself came from "militia". Lord Nelson for example 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.
  • The People's Liberation Army is the name of China's entire armed forces. It comes from the fact that it began as Comintern-sponsored guerrilla groups, which were completely land-based.
• Cavalry is kept as a designation for units in many countries even though they no longer have horses. Many of these units once did.
• Some British and Commonwealth Units have names including Dragoons, Horse, Lancers etc. Not to mention Rifles for some specific infantry units, despite the fact that all infantrymen now use rifles.
• 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 monarch.
• While US 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. This might be one of the reasons why only the Navy and Marine Corps still call it "boot camp" instead of "basic".
• All the US 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 US Navy's Shore Patrol, that service's military police, has some posts well inland (like naval hospitals).
• Describing a large battleship as a dreadnought. This was inspired by HMS Dreadnought, built in 1906, as the ship in question was so revolutionary a design with its size, armour protection, steam turbine propulsion, and an all-big-gun main armament that it was nothing like the then-state-of-the-art 'battleships'. The name dreadnought as a term for the new type of capital ships became so popular that earlier battleships started to be described as pre-dreadnoughts. As Technology Marched On and pre-dreadnought battleships vanished from the seas, the more general-purpose name battleship crept back into use to describe the most heavily-armed and armoured fighting ships. However, some navies and many official publications, particularly in the UK, stuck with the name dreadnought, even though its reason for use no longer existed. Eventually, the term dreadnought came to refer to battleships of the "Dreadnought era", loosely defined as ending in the early 1920s with the Washington Naval Treaty's 10-year ban on the building of new battleships.
• The SKS rifle takes its name from the Russian for 'self-loading carbine system'. However, it was more widely used, popularized by and strongly associated with the Chinese Army, who designated it as the Type 56.
• For some militaries, notably the US Marines, the rank of Lance Corporal is not a non-commissioned officer (NCO). The rank was traditionally, and still is for some countries, an NCO rank, albeit the lowest one.
• The US Navy's SEAL Team Six, most famous for having taken out Osama bin Laden, might be seen in its original incarnation as a invocation of this trope. At that time, during the Cold War, they were the only elite unit trained to do the things they did — but to make the Soviets think there were others, they were given the "Six". There were other SEAL Teams at the time (devoted to wartime missions like scouting and sabotage, as opposed to Team Six's dedicated counter-terrorism role), but only two of them. It became a straight version of the trope when the name was kept after 1991 although the deception was no longer necessary and the truth about the name became more of an open secret.
• The US Army's Corps of Engineers is still the unit that does all the engineering work for the Army. But, that name doesn't cover the fact that, due to the Army's jurisdiction over all inland waterways, the COE accumulated enough hydrologic knowledge to become the federal agency that regulates wetlands protection, reviewing all civilian projects that might affect them.
• The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, aka NATO, was founded as a military alliance by the victorious Allies on the Western Front after World War II, in case the Soviet Union decided to take advantage of the situation and bring all of Europe under their hegemony as it already had on the Eastern Front. At first, the geographical delineation of the name made sense—it included the US, Canada, Iceland, Britain, Norway, Denmark, West Germany, the Low Countries, France, Spain and Portugal. Italy was a bit of a stretch, but they bordered on France so we can give them a break. But in the late 1940s, US president Harry Truman got Turkey and Greece to join, making the name an artifact. With many of the former Warsaw Pact countries and the Baltic States now members, it's gotten a rather long way from the Atlantic.
  • And many of NATO's member countries have all sent troops to, or provided support for, the war in Afghanistan, a landlocked country in Central Asia.
• The position of batman (no, not that one) in the military (an officer's personal servant or personal assistant—basically a military valet) gets its name from the pack saddles known as "bats", which it was originally the batman's job to pack and unpack for the officer. The name has been kept long after the horses were put out to pasture.
• The land fighting force of the Soviet Union was known as the Red Army until after World War II, years beyond when the distinction between it and the White Army that had opposed it during the Civil War needed to be made.
• The Swedish Livregementets husarer ('Life Regiment Hussars', a guards unit), first formed in the early 16th century, now consists of an airborne rapid-response battalion and a high-tech intelligence battalion using drones instead of horses for reconnaissance. That is, they have the same roles as they have had for half a millennium, but they can't be called proper hussars any more.
• China still calls its military the People's Liberation Army, the name it was founded under when the Communist Party controlled very little if any, territory. That "liberation" of China was effectively accomplished in 1949 but the name has remained.
  • And the sea fighting force of China, the People's Liberation Army Navy is either a clumsy attempt to avert this trope or a straightforward invocation of it, depending on how you look at it.^note "People's Liberation Army" refers to the entire armed forces of China, not just what would be called an 'army' in most nations; that portion is known as the People's Liberation Army Ground Force. This could also translate as People's Liberation Army Army, but two different Chinese words that can translate as "army" are used. Taking it to an extreme, China's amphibious forces are named the People's Liberation Army Navy Marine Corps.
• Small arms bullets are still referred to as ball ammunition despite the fact that no army has fired literal spheres of lead out of muskets for more than a century. It mostly sticks around as an alternative name for full metal jacket-type bullets.
• The portion of a US Navy submarine extending from the top, where the bridge is, is called the 'sail'. No submarine ever has, for obvious reasons, used wind power even in part, and even if they ever had those structures couldn't possibly provide it.
  • This same part of the vessel is often called the "conning tower". So named because in the old days a captain would control (a.k.a. 'conn') the surfaced sub from a platform at the top of the tower. Advances in technology made such platforms unnecessary, and the US Navy insists its modern sails aren't conning towers even though the name has still stuck in popular lexicon.
• Many Royal Navy carrier aircraft that were adapted from Royal Air Force designs will keep the name of their land-based cousin, but prefix it with the word 'Sea', for example, Sea Hurricane, Sea Gladiator, Sea Hornet and Seafire^note (navalized versions of the Hurricane, Gladiator, Hornet and Spitfire respectively). This tradition was continued with the Sea Fury, despite the land-based Fury being cancelled without ever entering service with the RAF.
• The "five-in-one" blank cartridge, named because it fit in three calibers of rifle and two calibers of pistol, was something of a misnomer no matter how you looked at it, since it only actually worked in three calibers (.38-40, .44-40, and .45 Colt), hence why it was more rarely just called the "three-in-one" blank; two of those three just happened to have both pistols and rifles available in them at the time. Modern plastic versions are an artifact no matter how you count them, since there are now also rifles in .45 Colt and the blanks also work with .44 Magnum, .44 Special, and .410 shotshells, all of which are also available in both pistols and longarms, so depending on how you count them it's now anywhere between a six-in-one to a twelve-in-one.
• The name "Janissaries" literally means 'new soldiers'. The institution lasted for nearly five centuries.
• Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe stopped being an exclusive air force in 1942, when it developed the Luftwaffe Field Divisions. This was a result of the legendary amount of intentional competition and infighting within Germany's military during the Nazi era. Due to the losses sustained fighting the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht requested that personnel from other branches be transferred to the Heer (army) to replenish it. The Luftwaffe, seeing that doing so would diminish their political power, instead chose to develop their own dedicated infantry and armor divisions and deploy those to the front under their own command structure. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Luftwaffe Field Divisions ended up being the Butt-Monkey of the Nazi armed forces, particularly since the Soviet Union quickly realised that the Luftwaffe Field Divisions were usually the weak link in any defensive line and that picking on them was often the easiest way to achieve a breakthrough. These units were eventually transferred to the Heer anyway, but even so, the Luftwaffe still kept a tank division around until the very end.
  • Though today, the modern German (formerly West German) Air Force has retained the name "Luftwaffe" in spite of possible connection to the Third Reich and the Wehrmacht.