Technical Names

I love that so many modern technical gizmos and concepts have rather less-than-technical names. I thought of a few, and I'm gonna try to think of some more while I'm typing. Firstly, this strangely shaped item with which I'm moving this fancy arrow around my monitor is called a "mouse." Now I don't claim to be equipped with nomenclature skills, but a mouse? I mean, I guess it has some mouse-like characteristics, like it's roughly mouse-sized and has a long, tail-like affair coming out the back of it. I'll let it lie. Sit still; lay.
What else? I mentioned this issue to a few people this weekend, and I forget who came up with some, but one I really liked was "cookies." You know sometimes when you open your web-browser and you go to a page and it asks you if you would like cookies enabled? Now, who in his/her right mind would ever want their cookies disabled? I've spent a good portion of my life making sure that my cookies were indeed enabled.
Ooh, I like this one. So before you could actually write on CDs, and before flash-drives and ipods, we all had to use some other devices to store our data if we wanted to transfer it from one computer to another. Since they were not hard disks like we have inside our computers, the proverbial "they" tried to come up with a softer word to describe these plastic squares. Instead of calling them "soft" disks, they went with "floppy" disks. "Floppy" is a fantastic word. Heh, floppy!
Now I'm gonna get a bit, erm, quantum on y'all, but this one is too good to ignore. So, two of our favorite sub-atomic particles, namely protons and neutrons, are actually made of smaller particles called quarks. There are six types of quarks, and I'll let their names speak for themselves: top, bottom, up, down, charm and strange. What? Sounds like the rewards you get for completing the bonus levels in Final Fantasy III. "You have obtained the Charm Quark! Return to headquarters to receive your reward!" Not only that, but each quark has a quantifiable characteristic called "strangeness." I wish you could put a number on my strangeness; it would be at least e^(i*Pi)+1.