mercedo's Journal: Mozilla

The word Mozilla is a combination of Mobile and Godzilla, probably. Godzilla is a famous monster but few might know that Godzilla is a intermixture of Gorilla and 'whale' Whale? Yes, the Japanese word for whale is 'Kuzilla'. When I found the word 'Quizilla', and when I found the figure of Quizilla, I smiled. Because the figure of 'Quizilla' was so similar to 'Kuzilla' or whale. Word travels.

mosaic + godzilla

[weierstrass]

mosaic is an old web browser [wikipedia.org]. Firefox was based on Mozilla which was based on Netscape Navigator which was based on Mosaic. Computer language changes much faster than traditional language so it's interesting to see the evolution of words which takes lifetimes in ordinary languages.

Re:

[mercedo]

I had no idea what 'mo' represents. Words are imprinted on someone's mind without consciousness. So when someone start using some words they don't often realise where the coined word came from.