According to Daniel McNeill and Paul Freiberger in their book Fuzzy Logic, when Lotfi Zadeh coined the term in his 1964 paper that introduced the concept, his choice of the term "fuzzy logic" was a most unfortunate one1.
Since "Fuzzy logic" has been used in the past to mean Bad logic, the concept was attacked from all quarters. This in turn led to the concept being shunned in the United States.
Fuzzy technology was, however, adopted quite readily in non-Anglophone nations such as Japan2 and Denmark, in whose translation something was perhaps gained.
1The authors suggest that the term multivalue logic would have made a better choice.
2Simulacron3 ret^Hports that the Japanese, at least, missed the chance to come up with a better name: They use a simple phonetic transcription that sounds something like 'fah-jee row-jeek', which gets shortened to just 'fah-jee', reminiscent of fudgy.