Meander

Two thousand years ago, around the time a nondescript couple shuffled into Bethlehem, some Greeks were busy bringing lawsuits against one of their gods. His name was Maiandros, known as Maeander to the Romans.

Maeander's river, neighbors claimed, had been "wandering deceptively over the Phrygian plain [...] conceal[ing] the direction of its flow" (Propertius) and "altering the boundaries of the countries on his banks" by sweeping away "projecting elbows of land" (Strabos). In other words: 

Once a channel begins to follow a sinusoidal path, the amplitude and concavity of the loops increase dramatically due to the effect of helical flow sweeping dense eroded material towards the inside of the bend, and leaving the outside of the bend unprotected and therefore vulnerable to accelerated erosion, forming a positive feedback loop. 

In the end, Maeander was convicted for destroying property with his twisted ways. His name became synonymous with "a winding course". And so it was associated with a classic Greek design of linear motifs;

mathematics borrowed it to describe a self-avoiding closed curve intersecting a line;

surveyors started running meander lines along the banks of streams and lakes;

and in the 19th century people traveling by boat started to "meander" just by doing their thing. Today all you need to do is walk (or talk) circuitously, even in the middle of a bone-dry desert, to evoke his name. 

Unfortunately, though Maeander paid his dues to society (through local ferry tolls), the god was never able to clear his name. Four hundred years later, a poet described him "lurking in the secret places with his water in the lap of earth -- [he] who rolls deep through the earth and drags his crooked stream towards the light, crawling unseen and travelling slantwise underground, until he leaps up quickly and lifts his neck above the ground" (Nonnus). Not a particularly heartwarming characterization, though Gollum might disagree.

Perhaps the god deserves his sour reputation. Maeander continues to frustrate many, at least vicariously, through aggressive river curves that "migrate" downstream too quickly and wreak havoc for civil engineers... 

In other words, meandering meanders still manage to mess stuff up.

"Meander scars" of Argentina's Rio Negro

And so the river god's name lives on, for better or for worse.