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this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Not a "common" term, but the word Neanderthal comes from the name of a river valley in Germany where neanderthals were first discovered. The valley in turn is named after a Calvinist hymn writer named Joachim Neander who often visited the valley and used its natural beauty as inspiration for his hymns. I find the unintentional synthesis of two ideas that many people would otherwise regard as incongruous to be beautiful in a weird way.
It gets even better than that - Neander also changed his name from German Neumann "new man" to Greek Ne-Ander (also "new man"). So, Neanderthals, the "newly discovered men" were coincidentally from the "new man valley", named after a guy who changed his name from "new man" to "new man".
The "thal" in Neanderthal, meaning "valley", is also the word from which we get the money denomination "thaler", whence "dollar"!
Another fun fact: official German spelling later changed "thal" to "tal" (both pronounced as a hard "t"), so now the valley is Neandertal, not "Neanderthal"
This reminds me of the bird called the canary which means dog. It gets its name because some islands were discovered that had a bunch of wild dogs, and they named them the Canary Islands (from canine). Later on it was discovered that a small yellow bird was endemic to the islands so they named it after the place they lived.