I thought of calling it 'information', but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty'. [...] Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'
Conversation between Claude Shannon and John von Neumann regarding what name to give to the or attenuation in phone-line signals[37]