The "strange" quark is involved in hadron reactions which involve "strangeness", the property of hadron reactions that resisted explanation until the quark model was proposed. The quark model was widely accepted precisely because it explained strangeness, i.e. why certain expected hadron reactions did not occur (were "strange").

I liked the actual creator's (George Zweig) name, "aces". He saw the need for a 4th quark (charmed) before anyone else. I guess he would have called the top and bottom quarks "jokers" and flavors "suits". The history of physics has a few massive injustices, and this is one.

Really? Of course a few of us knew they wouldn't - it's sort of like looking for the Cheshire cat. It's more or less a definition of the vacuum. It's a deus-ex-machina to explain how a - necessarily massless - gauge theory can describe massive things.

Do you have a link?

BTW the "color" theory (chromodynamics, QCD) of the strong interactions is on better theoretical footing than the electro-weak theory where the Higgs boson is needed. In QCD the gauge fields (gluons) are actually massless and spontaneous symmetry breaking is not required. Having said that, you still can't calculate much of anything with it and it has an even more intractable issue, quark confinement (still unproven theoretically).