[Someone]

'To curry' also already was a verb, and as a bonus, that verb has the connotation of 'adding something'. To curry a function, you add a value for its first argument. That helped it become popular. I don't think this would have survived if it would have been called 'to Knuth', 'to Kernighan', or 'to Jensen' (in general, names for stuff one adds in moderation to something larger to improve it give good names for small things one adds to something larger: 'salt' in cryptography and 'syntactic sugar' are other examples)

"Some prefer 'first' and 'rest', but compact composed versions like '(cadr x)' for (car (cdr x)) don't exist for those English variants."

It may be lack in my mastery of English, but AFAIK, 'cadr' didn't exist, either, but that didn't stop it from becoming the standard way to describe the second item in a list.

If they had used first and rest, we likely would have frest and frrest for cadr and caadr, and I wouldn't rule out 'rfirst' either; it is not as if that is harder to pronounce than 'cdar'.

[jonlachlan]

Your description refers to "partial application", which is different from currying. I think that many people are comfortable with "currying" only because they think it's the same as partial application. The fact that this is incorrect is good reason to revisit the term.