I find that Emacs is actually the first mover on prime technologies. Just look at gptel and org-mode. Nothing else really even comes close. The reason some odd names exist like yank and kill or kill chain is because Emacs was the first and didn't have anything else to use as reference.

Kill chain is a military term relating to the sequence of events that lead up to the actual attack.

You're probably thinking of kill ring, which I always thought was a neat term.

That's right teco/emacs pre-dates xerox gypsy, which coined cut/copy/paste.

Technically Kill and Yank came from TECO, which is an entirely different visual editor that predates Emacs.