A long time ago I corrected you when you said that you used to call grease fittings "Alemites". I said they should be called "Zerks", not "Alemites".
I was wrong.
Browsing through some old publications I have, I came across a July 2004 issue of Skinned Knuckles, wherein author Bill Cannon tells the history of pressure lubrication systems (more interesting than you might think!).
According to Cannon's research, the fitting everybody knows as "Zerk", with the little ball on the end, is properly known as "Alemite hydraulic". A "Zerk" fitting looks just like that, but has no little ball and pre-dates the Alemite hydraulic.
By 1933 Stewart-Warner engineers had come up with the idea of adding the little ball to the end of the Zerk fitting to eliminate the mess that would result if you released pressure on the Zerk while injecting grease. The resulting fitting was given the "Alemite hydraulic" name by Stewart-Warner.
Prior to the modification of the Zerk design, the name "Alemite" belonged to a type of fitting that looked sort of like a bayonet-mount automotive light bulb, with little pins on the sides.
True Zerks are no longer used on cars, everybody having now migrated to Alemite hydraulics.