I Am Not Shazam/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


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Other Examples

  • Contrast I Am Not Spock.
  • Many companies are so heavily associated with some of their more famous products that they are actually confused with them. Numerous are those that refer to Apple Inc. as "Macintosh".
    • Another famous example is the Mercedes-Benz. The name of the company which manufactures it is Daimler. Naturally, they don't make Daimler cars, Jaguar does: Daimler was originally a Daimler-Benz brand, but due to a contract mistake accidentally handed the right to the name over to a licensee.
    • 'Barbie' is often referred to as a company, rather than just a product made by Mattel.
    • Many years ago the paint manufacturer Berger ran a campaign in the UK to try to raise awareness of its own name rather than that of its various paint brands.
    • Of further note are several companies that, while they did not originally share their names with their better-known brand names, have changed their names to avoid confusion. Convenience-store chain 7-Eleven's corporate presence was known as Southland Corporation until 1999, and fast food chain Jack in the Box was incorporated under the name Foodmaker until the same year.
      • With 7-Eleven it's a bit more complicated. To make long story short, the company just went bankrupt and was bought out by its Japanese partner, Seven & I. Holdings.
      • In the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, a Burger King wanted to open up. As Lake Forest is a fairly wealthy suburb, Burger King approached the city under the name of the corporate owners. When the Burger King went up, the city protested as they didn't want a fast food place, but had already signed off on the restaurant.
      • Here's a particularly fun one: the UK division of Mars, the maker of the eponymous candy bar, changed their name to Masterfoods in 2001, to try to distance their non-candy brands from that of the well-known chocolate bar. Then five years later, they changed their name back to Mars because the new name wasn't as memorable.
        • The American division took the same name in 2005, but changed back at the same time as the UK division; everyone, even the business media, just kept calling them "M&M Mars" anyways, while almost nobody knows they make Pedigree and Whiskas pet foods.
    • The Haloid Corporation changed its name to Xerox.
    • Binney & Smith changed their name to Crayola LLC in 2007.
    • An episode of Jeopardy! asked which company made the Bold 9000 smartphone. The correct question was not Blackberry as they said it was, but rather Canadian firm Research in Motion.
    • Sun Microsystems Inc. switched their Nasdaq stock symbol from SUNW to JAVA in 2007, after their popular programming language. Sun originally started out selling only hardware.
    • Software makers regularly do this. "AVAST Software", maker of the popular antivirus, was once called "ALWIL Software". "Diskeeper Corporation" started out as "Executive Software".
  • Sportscaster Sam Leitch once said of a victory by a Scottish football club named Raith Rovers that the fans would be dancing in the streets of Raith. Only problem is, Raith isn't a settlement.
    • Lampshaded when the Welsh football club TNS won the League of Wales and a sportscaster announced that fans would be dancing in the streets of TNS. TNS is Total Network Solutions, the name of the club's sponsor.
      • Or was - in a strange smashing-up-then-reconstituting of this trope, when the sponsorship deal ended the club obviously couldn't keep the name, but as it had moved from its former home of Llansantffraid it could no longer revert to that name either so had to create a brand new one for itself. The, erm, solution? Take the ex-Llansantffraid's nickname of 'the Saints' ('sant' being Welsh for 'saint') and by a logical and convenient extension rebrand yourself as The New Saints - different name, same initials. So they are not in a place called TNS and they are no longer sponsored by TNS, but they are still TNS... It's not yet known whether their 2009-10 season title-winning performance provoked any commentary along the lines of "They'll be dancing in the streets of New Saints".
    • The first stage-show based on Scottish football comedy series Only An Excuse featured two fans shouting abuse at the teams, including "Get back tae Raith!"
  • Strictly speaking, Big Ben is the name of the bell that strikes the hour in the Great Clock at Westminster, rather than the clock itself or its clock tower.
    • Double example here, since most people who know the tower isn't called Big Ben persist in correcting people who get it wrong by informing them it's actually called St. Stephen's Tower. It isn't. St Stephen's Tower is a small tower at the main entrance to the Palace of Westminster (called St. Stephen's entrance), but the error is so widespread most tourist information websites still get it wrong. The tower which contains Big Ben was simply called the Clock Tower until 2012, when it was renamed Elizabeth Tower in honour of Elizabeth II's diamond jubilee. Not that any of this keeps The Other Wiki from calling their page about the tower "Big Ben".
  • The founder of "Wendy's" was Dave Thomas. (No, not that Dave Thomas.) "Wendy" refers to his daughter, who recently[when?] started appearing in commercials for the restaurant.
    • Same with Mercedes, which is named after the daughter of one of the employees of Daimer-Benz.
  • Inversion: In the 19th century, a Russian delegation climbed aboard a train on what was a new British railway network (Southern Railways, to be specific) and one of the delegation looked out of the window, seeing a facility where passengers could board and alight trains and saw a sign reading "VAUXHALL". Consequently, when introducing a railway network to their country the word was used for such a facility. To this day the Russian word for railway station has been vauxhall.
  • While there is a town of that name in the Zone of Alienation, Chernobyl refers to the district in which the nuclear disaster took place. The power plant is located in Pripyat, 15 km from the town of Chernobyl.
    • Incidentally, the official name of the power plant wasn't Chernobyl, it was the Vladimir I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station.
  • Not many people know that Paul Frank's famous monkey character is actually called Julius, those people actually think he shares his creators name.
  • Also "for the record", "Christ" is the Greek-derived word for "anointed" (how you show someone is a king, prophet or both). The Aramaic/Hebrew-sourced version being, of course "Messiah". In either case, "Christ" is NOT Jesus' last name.
    • To help illustrate this, many times in Paul's letters, he refers to "Christ Jesus", which is not a typo.
  • I dare you to find someone named Real Life or The Real World.
  • The authors of many older Jewish theological books, such as Ḥazon Ish or Ben Ish Ḥai, are commonly referred to by the name of their works, even though their real names are known. This is roughly equivalent to knowing Herman Melville as "Moby Dick".
  • Nintendo is the name of the company, not any of the consoles it created. Ditto for Atari and Sega. Similarly, you don't play "Nintendo", you play the games.
  • In United States space travel, Apollo refers to the name of the program, not the rocket (either Saturn IB or Saturn V, depending on the mission), or the spacecraft itself (each Command Module and Lunar Module had its own name).
  • Kimberley-Clark is known as "the Kleenex company" despite having several other very successful products like Huggies diapers and Cottonelle toilet paper.
  • A cockney is traditionally born within the sound of Bow Bells. Many people, even a lot of Londoners if they were honest, think this refers to the district of Bow deep in the old East End. In fact Bow Bells refers to the church of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside, right in the heart of the financial district. Given the amount of traffic and building work in the area one would have to be born on the pavement outside to be within earshot. One American guide book had a good stab at the truth, insisting that Bow Bells were not in fact in Bow but in Aldgate. At least it was partly right.
  • The University of Wisconsin actually refers to thirteen campuses in cities scattered all across the state. The school that most know as "Wisconsin" and whose athletic teams play in the Big Ten is actually the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
    • This tends to cause frustration for students and alumni from the other UW schools such as UW-Stevens Point (UWSP) or UW-Whitewater (UWW) when applying for jobs out of state who often end having to explain the naming convention. This is particularly a problem for UW-Milwaukee which also shares the UWM initials with Madison (although the Madison campus is usually referred to only as UW with no qualifiers). This has led some to casually refer to the university by a technically incorrect name, University of Milwaukee, in the hope of avoiding confusion.
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