eponymsetymologyterminology
There is a generic material called "Binder's Board". Which is the board that the covers of hardcover books are made from. In the industry, it is also called "Davey Board". I have done quite some searching around, but have not found a definitive source for the term. Does anyone know where this came from?
Davey seems like a person's name, so I can only guess that a person named Davey made this board or was one person who was well known at some time in the past.
This definition of smurfing comes from 1996 and the game Warcraft II when certain well-known players made up new names, pretend to play badly, then beat the other players. They picked the names PapaSmurf and Smurfette.
It was used in alt.games.starcraft, and defined in April 1999 as:
someone who makes a new account then pretends they are a newbie.
An origin was offered in the same group in February 1999:
How prevalent do you think fake newbies are? You know, good players who
lure real newbies in for an easy win. Why do they get their jollies from
doing something so stupid?I think it's interesting to note, however, that this kind of
thing was started in Warcraft II days by Shlonglor and his buddies,
who seem to be demi-gods for some people. They called it smurfing and
Shlonglor's stated reason for it was because they couldn't find anyone
who wanted to play them. So they started picking on newbies and having
great fun 'smurfing' them, that's the name they gave it. He went on to
say how there quickly developed the habit of smurf-smurfing, great fun
he said. Yeah, and who's the one suffering from all this fun the
experienced are having? The newbie, of course. If it isn't the most
inconsiderate behaviour I've ever seen..
A Warcraft II: Glossary defines:
Smurfing
A slang term coined by Warp! and Shlonglor to mean good or famous players using fake names to hide from people then attempting to beat other players. It is only a "Smurf" if those players win.
The earliest definite use of smurfing I found was in alt.games.warcraft in August 1996:
heheh, when a really good player is depressed or is looking for fun whipping the living hell out of a newbie, he adopts a fake name and then joins game and ACTS like a newbie, then he thouroughly destroys everyone in the game. this bizzare act is called smurfing, when he said "don't step on any smurfs" he meant don't get so caught up u find a smurf, and then get the living hell beat out of you :)
There was also a reference in alt.games.warcraft that some experienced players were "probably smurfs" in July 1996.
More description:
it was started by Shlonglor, who is more than a SC player (he works for Blizzard as their webmaster). He was one of the all-time War2 gurus and was extraordinarily famous due to his war2 page ... still one of the best gaming pages ever created (although it's no longer anywhere on the net ... he took it down when he began to work for Blizzard).
Anyhoo, there came a point in Shlonglor's fame where no one but a few select individuals would play him; everyone, hearing his name, would do one of the following things: cower in fear, worship like mad, or repeatedly challenge like a newbie. In the midst of this it was virtually impossible for him to get a game.
SO ... Shlonglor and his roommate at the time, Warp, came up with a stroke of genius: make up a false name that no one would recognize and go beat the * out of newbies.
For whatever reason, the names they chose were "Papa Smurf" and "Smurfette."
From hence came the term "Smurfing."
(Shaf, 1999)
A quote by Shlonglor from 2003:
-(1996) I was the originator of the term "Smurf" or "Smurfing" to signify a famous person playing games under a fake name. Before that point, everyone stuck with whatever nickname they had and never considered changing their name or playing under fake names. It began when me and Warp! played under fake names "Smurfs" and fooled all our friends. I made a page about it and it caught on big time. Pretty soon everyone played under made-up names and you had no idea who you were playing. This practice continues to happen a TON today and you still hear about Smurfing/Smurfs which all dates back to me, my site, and my Smurf page.
And an extract from an August 1996 game report ("The Smurfs vs Spiderman(Zima), Red Barron, and Void(idiot)") by Warp!:
Well, I finally played a game worth writing a story about. It was a five player game on Garden of War with medium resources. The players involved were Shlonglor (playing as PapaSmurf), Myself (playing as Smurfette), RedBaron, Void, and Spiderman (who we later discovered was the same person as Zima/Cpl_Will). Shlonglor and I were teammates as were RedBaron, Void, and Spiderman.
And then by Shlonglor, this may be the earliest description:
First let me explain the Smurf thing. Warp and I enjoy making up names and playing people at war2. We make them think we really suck and then beat them up. But the joke was on me because Zima pulled my own trick on me. He played as Spiderman making me think he sucked. Beaten at my own game! So sad. Well we have lots of fun playing as smurfs. We talk in smurf. We smurf us some ass at war 2. I guess that is totally childish, but it sure is fun.
You seem to be asking about the origin of the term as used in category theory. The history of the term there is somewhat unclear, but it can at least be traced back a little ways:
The term is sometimes attributed to Mac Lane, but this seems to be inaccurate; however, the widespread use of the term is probably due to his influential "Categories for the Working Mathematician", replacing the remarkably terrible term "triple".
The frequent but unfortunate use of the word "triple" in this sense has achieved a maximum of needless confusion, what with the conflict with ordered triple, plus the use of associated terms such as "triple derived functors" for functors which are not three times derived from anything in the world. Hence the term monad.
Mac Lane's use of the term was apparently prompted by J. P. May:
The name "operad" is a word that I coined myself, spending a week thinking about nothing else. Besides having a nice ring to it, the name is meant to bring to mind both operations and monads. Incidentally, I persuaded MacLane to discard the term "triple" in favor of "monad" in his book "Categories for the working mathematician", which was being written about the same time. I was convinced that the notion of an operad was an important one, and I wanted the names to mesh.
Elsewhere, Ross Street attributes the term to Jean Bénabou:
Meanwhile Jean Bénabou had invented weak 2-categories, calling them bicategories. (...) He pointed out that a lax functor from the terminal category 1 to Cat was a category A equipped with a "standard construction" or "triple" (that is, a monoid in the monoidal category [A, A] of endofunctors of A where the tensor product is composition); he introduced the term monad for this concept.
The attribution to Bénabou is also mentioned here.
The motivation for the term is to suggest a relationship with monoids, as can be deduced from the construction given in the quote above, and the Greek root "monos" comes second-hand. The connection to philosophy in general, or Leibniz in particular, is often asserted but never to my knowledge supported in any way. More likely if anything would be a connection to the term "monad" used in non-standard analysis, also related to Leibniz, but I'm not sure what the conceptual link there would be. An anecdote from Michael Barr relates the first use of the term:
(...) The attendance consisted of practically everyone in the world who had any interest in categories, with the notable exception of Charles Ehresmann. (...) One day at lunch or dinner I happened to be sitting next to Jean Benabou and he turned to me and said something like "How about 'monad'?" I thought about and said it sounded pretty good to me. (Yes, I did.) So Jean proposed it to the general audience and there was general agreement.
The off-the-cuff nature of the suggestion, and immediate positive response from a large audience, suggests that there's probably no written record of the term being introduced formally. It's certainly possible that the word was borrowed from use in philosophy or elsewhere, but in any case there appears to be no connection more meaningful than the level of "cheap pun".
As far as I know, the only way you're going to get a better answer than that is by asking Bénabou himself.
Best Answer
It would appear that the name comes from The Davey Company (Davey Est 1842) who invented and manufactured various types of board under the Davey trademark(s).