Yes, some jargon are not completely descriptive; however, it's a general goal to make it something as descriptive as possible for someone in the field, often by analogy, or to name it after the most prominent advocator/discoverer.
I'd say your assertion isn't actually true, and never was. CS technical terms come from mathematics and its tradition, and look at the very basic terms like "
magma" (which means: "set with an operation on its elements for which all results are also in the set") or "
eigenvalue" (which I would need several sentences to describe the meaning of in the most basic terms, even if I were trying to go for the shortest possible explanation), where the second one's name
doesn't come from being named after someone called "Eigen" - instead, it's from the German word for "self".
For a more software-relevant technical term (though eigenvalues are used quite a bit in physics engines too), try finding out what a "dual quaternion" is and what it's useful for by its name alone - even when knowing which of the many, many meanings of "dual" it refers to and what a "quaternion" is.
All in all, it doesn't change the facts of the matter: Python passes a reference for which assignments of the argument cannot be seen by the caller.
That's implementation-specific. Python implementations (there is more than one already) can implement the same call-by-sharing semantics by actually copying the argument values, then copying them back if they were modified in the function. This is useful if the function is running on a different computer from the calling environment.