This reminds me of when the term AJAX was introduced. I thought it was a stupid attempt to foist a "cool" name on an already existing term.

Yet it may be coincidental but that seemed to coincide with the time that using an XMLHTTPRequest took off.

Maybe the branding worked?

The NoSQL hype happened because people wanted to explore and promote alternatives. The NoSQL name happened since there was a need to provide a moniker to the alternatives. Since this was a hype and movement based on otherwise real need, it is likely to have happened even if the name was something completely different say FreeQL (or whatever other catchy name). The post isn't arguing there shouldn't be a name. All it is attempting to point out is that it should be a meaningful and appropriate name - else what you think (when you hear the name) and what you get (when you actually dig into the details) are very different. The current name actually makes it harder for newer participants to properly grok these storage systems - which wasn't perhaps the goal in the first place.

Surrogate keys are very common in real-world relational databases. If an order has a CUSTOMER_ID which was generated mechanically, appears in exactly one tuple of the CUSTOMERS relation, and has no other assigned meaning, isn't it just a pointer to that tuple?

I think "graph database" is probably the best term I've heard so far.

I think this might be a misnomer in that NoSQL in the general sense describes a set of technologies acting as value stores rather than a standardized language for accessing said values.

I like the name posted by someone in the comments -- NoTable.