WHAT IS A LED ZEPPELIN?

You won't believe how these iconic bands got their names!

Image: Graydon Driver

Due to constant repetition, the names of successful bands become household names. But, when we stop to think about them, some of those names are downright strange or, at the very least, curious. What is an Aerosmith? Or a Supertramp? Find the answers to these and a few other existential questions by scrolling through the following stories.

Image: JC Gellidon

In case anyone wondered, The Ramones were not a band of brothers named Ramone. The name of the band was first suggested by Dee Dee, after learning that Paul McCartney would check into hotels under the fake name 'Paul Ramon'. He convinced the other members to adopt the last name, and The Ramones came to be.

Image: Desi Mendoza

There are two versions of the origin of Alice Cooper’s name. In the early days, the story was that Alice Cooper was a spirit the band contacted via an Ouija board.

But in later years, the frontman himself has said that they came up with a name that could be someone’s grandmother – which made it a perfectly unorthodox match for a bunch of cross-dressing shock rockers.

Image: The National Library of Norway

If the rumors are correct, Jimmy Page (guitarist and frontman for what would become Led Zeppelin), Jeff Beck (guitarist for The Yardbirds, a band Page had been part of), Keith Moon (drummer for The Who), and John Entwistle (bass player for The Who) came up with the idea of forming a supergroup, but Moon suggested this would "go over like a lead balloon".

Sometime later, Page remembered this expression and, after swapping "balloon" for "zeppelin", decided to drop the "a" in "lead" to make it clear how the word should be pronounced: Led Zeppelin.

Image: Adrian Ordonez

Billy Gibbons, the guitar player for ZZ Top came up with the band’s name thanks to his obsession with blues music. He thought of combining the names of two bluesmen: Z.Z. Hill and B.B. King. But when ZZ King didn’t sound all that great, Gibbons made the slight shift to ZZ Top.

Image: Brands&People

There are many bands whose names are literary references to authors and their works. Uriah Heep got their name from a character in Charles Dickens’ 'David Copperfield.' Uriah Heep was a man untrustworthy and unlikable in the extreme.

As guitarist Mick Box said "We were formed on the 100th anniversary of Charles Dickens. There was publicity all over London to celebrate his birthday."

Image: Cody Board

Being the American answer to The Beatles, the Monkees needed a moniker similar to that of the Fab Four. Accordingly, they mispronounced the name of a creature from the natural world just as the Beatles had done in the first place.

Image: Tim Toomey

Another legendary group that got its name from a book is Supertramp. The British art-rockers got their name from W. H. Davies’ 1908 memoir 'The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp,' in which the Welsh writer details his wandering early days.

Image: Sisi

The fact that the Grateful Dead came up with their band name while under the influence surprises no one. Perusing a folklore dictionary, Jerry Garcia discovered the term, which related to the soul of an unburied dead person expressing karmic gratitude to someone who arranged for their eventual burial.

Image: Wayne Hollman

Not many bands are named after the drummer and the bass player. But Fleetwood Mac is. The outfit was christened after the names of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. This was a ploy devised by guitarist Peter Green to keep them in the band. And it worked; 5 decades and countless lineups later, the pair is the only remaining members from the ‘60s.

Image: Daniel Ebersole

The curious name of this legendary hard rock outfit originated, according to drummer Joey Kramer, while he and his girlfriend were listening to Harry Nilsson’s "Aerial Ballet" and the couple began toying with cool band names that had the word "aero" in them.

He liked how "Aerosmith" sounded, but the band he was in at the time didn’t. So it was shelved until Kramer joined Joe Perry and Steven Tyler’s group. The convincing was done and the rest is history.

Odd plurals

10 Irregular plurals and the fascinating history behind them

Usually, plural English nouns are pretty straightforward. Just add an -s or -es, and you're done. However, there are more than a few odd ones out: words that change their vowels, acquire unexpected endings, or become almost unrecognizable. These irregular nouns are not random: they are linguistic leftovers from older forms of English and from the many languages that contributed to its vocabulary. Here's a list of 10 irregular plurals that are considerably more interesting than simply adding an -s.

While the plural of mouse looks like an exception today, it is actually a survivor from a much older way of forming plurals called i-mutation, common in Old English and many Germanic languages. It's the same process that gave us geese, feet, teeth, and lice, among others.

English eventually abandoned this system in favor of the -s and -es mechanism for building plurals, but these words survive as remnants of the old times.

Children is an interesting case of what linguists call double plurals: words that conserve two different marks of plurality in their construction.

The Old English word cild was pluralized as cildru originally, and eventually as childre. As the language evolved, speakers added the plural suffix -en (also found in words like oxen and brethren) to form the word children. In effect, the word accumulated two markers of plurality.

English normally has a strong tendency to simplify these cases, which makes the survival of the word children (instead of childs) especially remarkable.

Cactus is a good example of what happens when English borrows a word, but speakers can't quite decide whether to keep the original language's grammar. The word entered English from Latin, and the traditional Latin plural of cactus is _cacti.

_However, English has its own perfectly sensible way of making plurals, and that has produced the word cactuses. In modern English dictionaries, both words are accepted. Cacti sounds more traditional and is particularly common in botanical contexts, while cactuses sounds more natural to everyday speakers.

Few English plurals generate as much debate as octopus. You'll commonly encounter octopuses, octopi, and, more rarely, octopodes. So which one is correct?

The popular form octopi comes from the mistaken assumption that octopus is a Latin word ending in -us and should therefore form its plural with -i, just like cacti. In reality, the word comes from the Greek oktōpous, meaning "eight-footed." Following Classical Greek rules, the plural should be octopodes.

While octopodes is closer to the original Greek, it's only common in specialized discussions. For ordinary English, octopuses is the simplest and most widely accepted choice.

In Latin, the singular datum means something that has been given, and data is its plural. English borrowed both forms, particularly in scientific and academic writing, where the distinction has remained important for centuries.

Today, datum is much less common outside of specialized contexts. While in formal scientific writing data is often still treated as plural, in everyday use many speakers treat it as a singular mass noun, as in "The data is stored on the server." The plural has effectively become more widespread than its original singular.

Phenomenon is another Greek word whose traditional plural has survived intact. In Greek, phainomenon referred to something that appears or is observed, while phenomena was its plural. English borrowed the pair through Latin and preserved the Greek-style ending.

Unlike cactus, where English developed an alternative plural, phenomena remains firmly established in educated and technical writing. It is especially common in science, where researchers may discuss multiple natural phenomena.

Both brothers and brethren are perfectly valid plurals of brother. However, in a surprising twist, they took on different nuances: while brothers is used for male siblings ordinarily, brethren (the older form) survived mainly in religious, fraternal, and formal contexts.

Brethren was once a normal plural of brother, but as English developed, the regular -s plural became increasingly dominant. Rather than disappearing completely, the older form became specialized. That gives us a fascinating example of a word developing two different plurals that coexist because they acquired different meanings.

The word die, referring to a single numbered polyhedron (most commonly a cube) used in games, entered English through the Old French dé, while dice developed from the French plural dés.

While the distinction is still very much in use, the singular die is losing strength in everyday English, and dice is increasingly being treated as both a plural and a singular noun. In time, the singular form die may disappear from everyday English vocabulary.

People is an especially interesting plural because it didn't originally come from the same word as person. The two words have completely different Latin origins.

Person ultimately comes from Latin persona, meaning a person, character, or role. People comes from Latin populus, meaning a population or nation, passing into English through French. Over time, English speakers began using people as the ordinary plural of person, even though the two words had separate histories.

The regular plural persons still exists and is perfectly legitimate, particularly in legal and formal contexts when referring to a group of individuals. But in ordinary conversation, people has become overwhelmingly dominant.

Index has two established plurals, and the choice between them often depends on what you're talking about. Indexes is the ordinary English plural, while indices preserves the Latin form and is especially common in mathematics, science, and economics.

The Latin plural indices survived in specialized fields because scholars continued using Latin-derived terminology. Meanwhile, ordinary English speakers naturally applied the familiar -es ending and produced indexes. Both forms are now standard.