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by Adrian Kosmaczewski
Antonomasia is a word derived from the Greek ἀντονομάζειν, which means, "to name differently." It is a rhetoric figure of speech, or metonymy, in which a concept is named after another closely related. Classical examples are, for example "King" for Elvis Presley, or "Fab Four" for The Beatles. In technology, "Xerox" for photocopying, "Big Blue" for IBM, "Google" for searching, but (surprisingly enough) not "iPhone" for smartphone. In the software industry, a similar phenomenon happens: "C++" for object orientation; "Java" for web apps; "Jenkins" for CI/CD; "Python" for machine learning; "Scrum" for Agile; and Kubernetes for DevOps.