Naming was never my specialty. Very little known tidbit.  When I wrote the first DHTML draft specification, I named it "Active HTML" (I will leave it up to you to figure out why this is a bad name back in 1997).   How did it change to "Dynamic" - from looking up Active in a thesaurus. 

However, Dynamic HTML as a name served its purpose well in the late 90's.  I do believe remarketing the existing technology as Ajax was a necessity for the community/ industry. Can you imagine all the new startups going for VC capital having to explain their cool new web innovations is based on 8 year old technology :-)?

Quote from Tim Bray's blog...

ongoing The Real AJAX Upside
"You know, I (Tim) could be excused for being a little bitter here. Everybody’s all gaga these days about AJAX as meme-ified by Jesse James Garrett. Check out Taxi to the Future, a piece I (Tim) wrote for XML.com in 2001, talking about how to improve user experience and system performance with a Transform-Aggregate-send XML-Interact architecture. Remind you of anything?

But you know, I’m actually not crying in my beer because first, Garrett was in the right place at the right time with the right acronym, and secondly, Scott Isaacs has been talking about this stuff since 1998 and helped invent most of the underlying technology, but dammit Scott, how could you ever expect to hit the memescape big-time with a dorky name like “Dynamic HTML”?"