[aidos]

Clever, I didn't pick that up.

That's not a portmanteau though is it? I thought a that was when you joined two words, eg hungry + angry = hangry. Maybe portmanteau has different variations that I'm unaware of - though I know I probably just sound like a pedant.

[agumonkey]

You're totally right, you're a pedant. JK, I was indeed confused, I don't know how to call a long chain of parallel associations like flash,fla -> flash gordon,alf -> gordon shumway -> shumway. Maybe it's a first.

[pbhjpbhj]

It's like stream of consciousness, I'd call it serial association rather than parallel. "Sui generis" maybe?

I'd be highly surprised if it were a new software naming method, it's definitely not a new thing of itself.

[agumonkey]

It was probably a sequence of thoughts, but the flash gordon | alf relationship is parallel, they're unrelated above the convergence point that is shumway.

[cpeterso]

There was another open-source Flash Player clone called "Gordon" (i.e. Flash Gordon). The founder of Gordon, Tobias Schneider, joined Mozilla to work on Shumway, the successor to Gordon.