&gt; The other reason is that eponymy is often a symptom of laziness. Rather than finding a good, descriptive name for something, you end up with an eponym that is not at all evocative of the meaning behind it.<p>The tongue-in-cheek flip side of this coin is that, when discovering something, one should give it a descriptive but complex name. That way, people are more likely to refer to it by the names of the discoverers than by the clumsy descriptive title the discoverers chose. :)