Yes - I recall Simon Peyton Jones (one of the Haskell designers) commented on this in a talk when he came to town. He said, "The biggest mistake we made was calling them Monads. That's a big scary word."
Re naming and specific APIs - there is a comment along these lines on this blog entry:
"As you may have noticed, I reused list concatenation as monoid addition, but this makes a lot of sense, as list concatenation satisfies all the monoid laws, and no other laws. A more accessible way of saying that a type is a monoid is to say that it is combinable, addable, appendable or summable."
Re naming and specific APIs - there is a comment along these lines on this blog entry:
"As you may have noticed, I reused list concatenation as monoid addition, but this makes a lot of sense, as list concatenation satisfies all the monoid laws, and no other laws. A more accessible way of saying that a type is a monoid is to say that it is combinable, addable, appendable or summable."
http://tailcalled.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/translation-of-mo...
I reckon 'addable' is what you were getting at with "build a specific API and then give it a different name."