[thaumasiotes]

> like the word has some element to it that does harken back to older days

It's more interesting than you might think! Turns out snail is a diminutive form of snake[1], from a root referring to creeping over the ground.

The other aspect of judgments of old-fashionedness is that things that are really old-fashioned, like being named Etheldreda, will tend to be rated as less old-fashioned than things that are pretty recent but out of current fashion, like being named Gertrude. The old old things are too forgotten to be "old".

My other question would be "why 'cosine similarity' rather than 'correlation'?". Same thing, but people are a lot more familiar with the term 'correlation'.

[1] OE snaca preserved the /k/ sound, but OE snægl voiced it, and the /g/ then predictably turned into a Y sound (compare "yard" / "day"), giving us the I of modern snail.