Welcome to the Forum, Roger! I’m truly delighted to find a real technology expert—a scientist no less—among the Forum membership.
You’re absolutely justified in getting vexed by the terms “owner-type jeep” and “Bureau of Fire Protection.” These two specimens of Filipino English are indeed misnomers, in the same way that the name “National Disaster Coordinating Council” (NDCC) was a monumental misnomer that lasted for so long. (Its recent incarnation, though, the “National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council,” isn’t only an unduly long and tedious name but also yields a vicious tongue-twister for an acronym, “NDRRMC.” It does seem like a case of jumping from the frying pan to the fire, so to speak.)
The term “owner-type jeep” refers, of course, to the stubby Willy’s-type motor vehicle with short chassis. It’s not meant to be a public utility vehicle, unlike what we know as the “passenger-type jeep,” and as such, it’s supposed to be driven by its owner or a family member. I suspect that it used to be more aptly called “owner-driven jeep,” but that the Filipino tongue balked at articulating the strange-sounding past participle “driven” and wasn’t comfortable either with the easier said but grammatically wrong “drived.” In time, everybody must have gravitated to the single-syllable, easy-to-pronounce, easily understood word “type” in place of “driven,” thus firmly establishing “owner-type jeep” as the idiomatic Filipino English usage. Afterwards, I feel pretty sure, adoption by the Land Transportation Office (LTO) of the term “owner-type jeep” for registration purposes wasn’t long in coming. (Based on your observation that the modifier “owner-type” seems trivial, however, I would suggest that “private jeep” is a more apt term for this type of vehicle.)
As to the name “Bureau of Fire Protection,” it’s indeed a semantically flawed term that—as you correctly observed—yields the absurd sense of a bureau protecting the fire instead of protecting people from it. Obviously, the name was meant to be short-hand for “Bureau That Protects People and Property from Fire”—except that the semantics of the term got mangled when rendered in short-hand as “Bureau of Fire Protection.” You’re right, of course, that “Bureau of Fire Control” is the semantically correct short-hand for that name. Not being semantically sensitive, however, some government bureaucrat must have been unable to sense the difference—and so the semantically flaky name “Bureau of Fire Protection” came to be enshrined in our statute books. It’s not too late for the government bureaucracy to consider changing that name to “Bureau of Fire Control,” but knowing how things work in this country, that would probably be for the long haul.
I agree with you that things and government bureaus in our country need to be named more carefully and in grammatically and semantically correct ways, but we shouldn’t forget that word-formation and language generally can’t be legislated. They just happen—and people simply are too busy with their day-to-day lives to correct even oddball terms and obvious misnomers. As a result, our world is awash with names that got established from wrong assumptions, like “Indians” for natives of the New World (the real “Indians,” of course, were to be found in India half a world away, but Christopher Columbus had gotten his geography wrong and the world got stuck with his mistake in nomenclature for posterity). I’m afraid that we will likewise be stuck with the terms “owner-type jeep” and “Bureau of Fire Protection” for good unless, well, unless some political strongman with a strong linguistic sense throws a tantrum someday and orders that those terms be replaced with the semantically correct ones that we came up with here today.
