* My own wife is named after Hector’s bride, the princess of Troy, Andromache. Hi, honey.
* This phrase, coined by Mesmer, had nothing to do with animals but with anima, the Latin word for soul.
* Rhymes with Conan, as in O’Brien, not the Barbarian.
* For trademarks staving off genericide, see frisbee, jacuzzi, and tupperware; for one already expired, see zeppelin.
*Archons were the magistrates of Athens, and the chief among them was the Archon Eponymos, so-called because the year in which he served was named after him.
* “The Kinquering Congs Their Titles Take.”
APPENDIX I
ANONYPONYMS
SANS FRONTIERES
A zeppelin is a zeppelin in languages across the world, except when it’s not. The standard term is often some form of the word dirigible. A reverse situation holds for the airship’s aimless cousin: What we call a hot-air balloon is known in other countries for the French brothers who invented it.
Although an American education might have you believe that the first men to fly were the Wright brothers, another pair of brothers beat them to the punch—by 120 years. Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier created the vehicle that produced the first manned flight in 1783, a balloon given lift by what the brothers called Montgolfier Gas. (It was just plain air, lest you think they produced gas in some other manner.) Their first flight crew consisted of a duck, a rooster, and a sheep; seeing their barnyard trio survive, the brothers sent humans skyward. Their creation is known as a montgolfier in French and a montgolfiere in Italian.
Trademarked names have taken root in languages everywhere, but even with global brands acceptance varies from country to country. You can take a yacuzzi in Spain or a jacuzzibad in Sweden, but in Portugal and Germany you’ll have to settle for a banho de hidromassagem and a Sprudelbad. A ballpoint pen is a biro in many parts of the world (Britain and Australia included), for its inventor László Biró, or a bic, after Marcel Bich, a Frenchman who licensed the technology from the Hungarian Biró. (Monsieur Bich was afraid his name would be mispronounced Bitch in anglophone countries, hence the spelling change.)
The eponyms used most widely and consistently come from the international world of science. A volt is a volt wherever you go, as are the psychological conditions of masochism and sadism (more or less). There’s a division, however, with X-ray. The Romance languages are in sync with the English formulation (e.g., the Spanish rayos X), which was coined by the discoverer of the X-ray, Wilhelm Röntgen, who in 1895 took the first X-ray photograph. (It was of his wife’s hand.) His native tongue, however, ditched the doctor’s suggestion and chose instead to honor Wilhelm himself, and so an X-ray is a Roentgen in German, as it is in most languages across northern and central Europe.
Medical terms tend to get discarded once the theories behind them have been discredited, as in the English-speaking world with onanism and the implication that masturbation is a wasting affliction. It remains standard usage, however, in countries such as Sweden (onani ) and Germany (Onanie).
More resilient have been certain political anonyponyms that spread like wildfire because they so captured a moment and continue to be relevant today. People around the globe have no more idea of who Charles Boycott was than English speakers do, but what’s striking about his word is the level of adoption it achieved, and how swiftly. Less than fifty years after the first boycott, the government of propagandist extraordinaire Benito Mussolini launched a political campaign to banish all nonnative words—le parole stranieri—from the Italian vocabulary. For example, a croissant by law had to be called a bombola. And the slogan on posters? ITALIANI, BOICOTTARE LE PAROLE STRANIERI!
Another political eponym, chauvinism, became useful in the face of nationalist movements that upended the world in war and strife—and found itself transformed into Polish szowinizm, Czech šovinizmus, Indonesian sovinisme, and Filipino tsowinisma, to name a few. It should be noted that the sexist connotation English chauvinism has taken on is missing in other languages. The Italian sciovinismo refers to excessive patriotism or partisanship, while what we would call male chauvinism is there styled maschilismo (formed in opposition, naturally, to femminismo). To mesmerize means to spellbind in English, but in other tongues remains a synonym for hypnotize, or is relegated specifically to the practices of Franz Mesmer. Sometimes figurative meanings wander quite far afield. A judas is a traitor in many languages, but in French it refers to a peephole, betrayer of the person being spied upon.
Literary eponyms are less likely than others to cross borders, excepting those based on widespread classics such as Don Quixote, attested to by English quixotic, Spanish quijotesco, and the arabesque Italian adverb donchisciottescamente. (In Italian, Cervantes’s work is Don Chisciotte [key-SHOAT-tay], if that helps parse it.) As for a word from an English book, lolita is spreading fast, more so in other languages than in the one it was written in. Generally it means a sexually precocious or aggressive young girl, although in Japan the word has come to represent a goth fashion style.
Ludwig Bemelmans’s 1941 travel book The Donkey Inside produced a word unique to the Spanish of Ecuador, bemelmans, which means “foreigner who makes fun of natives.” A sampling of text that might have offended: “We have a revolution here every Thursday at half-past two, and our government is run like a nightclub.”
A number of people live on in other languages but not their own. Martinet as an eponym does not exist in the drillmaster’s native tongue, although French has a word chatterton that means electrical tape after its British inventor, while bant endures in Swedish as the word for dieting. And though Pullman (after George, developer of the sleeper car) has faded from the English vocabulary along with the tendency to take overnight train rides, pullman (pronounced POOL-mahn) has spread to become the general Italian word for bus.
I’d like to end our linguistic tour by nominating a particularly handy word for English-language adoption. Johann Ballhorn, a printer during the last quarter of the sixteenth century, was responsible for publishing an important law book for his home city of Luebeck. In the process of correcting an earlier edition—a typical task of the printer in those days— Ballhorn wound up making mistakes where none had earlier been, thereby causing a legacy of legal disputes and bequeathing to German a verb, verballhornen, “to make worse through correcting.”
APPENDIX II
EPONYM WATCH LIST
Most eponyms die. Few outlive the fame of the people who birthed them, and most fade even faster. Some are superseded by synonyms while others become technologically obsolete, as is the case with the brougham, hansom, and phaeton, three types of horse carriages named after a couple of Englishmen and a kid who wrecked his father’s wheels. Fiction-based eponyms depend largely upon the vagaries of literary taste. In this respect no one has suffered more than Charles Dickens, once the most widely read writer in the English language, now falling off reading lists everywhere. A scrooge is known to all and a fagin understood by many, but who still knows what gamp, peck-sniffian, or gradgrind mean? (If you want to be the one, they are: an umbrella, after Sarah Gamp of Martin Chuzzlewit; hypocritical, for Seth Pecksniff of same; and a man given to facts, such as Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times.)
Below find some eponyms lamentably lost or seriously imperiled. Language is what its speakers make it, so you have power to revive them.
annie oakley
Annie Oakley, the sharpshooting star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, had her own breed of card tricks. At a distance of thirty paces, she could shoot out the heart in the ace of hearts, split a playing card in half with a bullet edgeways, and shoot half a dozen holes into a card tossed into the air before it hit the ground. Her name came to mean a free ticket or pass, as in one that’s already been punched.
Status: defunct
baedeker
A guidebook, after the widely read publications of Karl Baedeker, whose company started producing travel manuals in 1827. The “Baedeker raids” of World War II were s
o-called because the Germans struck at historical sites featured in Baedeker’s Great Britain.
Status: faint pulse
give a bell
Alexander Graham Bell was literally an eponym machine, bequeathing Ma Bell, the Baby Bells, decibel, and this term, for calling someone on the phone.
Status: under revival
bogart
Humphrey Bogart has the distinction of two English verbs springing from his surname. The first means to act like a tough guy or intimidate, as in, “Don’t bogart your little brother.”
Status: died out a generation ago
The second verb, meaning to steal something in small increments, went mainstream in the sixties time-capsule movie Easy Rider. “Don’t bogart that joint, my friend . . . ” begins the chorus of the song playing while Jack Nicholson rides on the back of Peter Fonda’s chopper. Its extended sense of “to be greedily protective of something” has lately been moving the verb out of its cannabis pigeonhole, which speaks well for its prospects for long-term survival (as does the fact that most people using it have never seen the Humphrey Bogart smokefest known as Casablanca).
Status: burgeoning
pull a brodie
To commit suicide, usually figuratively, coined in 1886 after Steve Brodie jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge to win a bet and survived. Although his feat was considered by many a hoax, Brodie parlayed his fame into a touristy saloon on the Bowery and acting gigs in a couple of vaudeville shows. He was later portrayed in the movies by George Raft and served as Bugs Bunny’s foil in “Bowery Bugs.” (Out of sheer exasperation with the rabbit, he jumps off the bridge again at the end.)
Status: jumped the shark long ago
burke
When an old man died owing back rent at his Edinburgh boarding house, landlord William Hare hit upon a unique way of getting the money out of him: selling the deadbeat’s corpse. With his friend William Burke, Hare stole the body out of its coffin and brought it to the local anatomy school. Seeing how well it paid, the duo entered into the dissection-supply business. Turning the lodging house into an operation Procrustes would have admired, Hare and Burke murdered at least fifteen transients before getting caught Halloween night, 1828. The evidence was circumstantial, but in turn for immunity Hare confessed, which is why he walked free and his pal got hanged, and the verb meaning “to smother to death or hush up” is to burke and not to hare.
Status: worth reviving
not to be grahamed
Giuseppe Mazzini was the intellectual father of the Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement. A philosopher and agitator with a death sentence hanging over his head, in 1837 Mazzini settled in London, a city that prided itself for its fair treatment of political exiles. When the British government was discovered to be opening Mazzini’s mail, the scandal was blamed on Home Secretary James Graham, and Britons began writing not to be grahamed on their envelopes in elegant protest.
Status: extinct
lindbergh it
To go solo, as in out to dinner, or wherever.
Status: my mother still uses it
lucy stoner
A slur targeting a woman who doesn’t take her husband’s name, coined after the marriage of suffragette Lucy Stoner in 1855. The surname Ms. Stoner chose not to take: Blackwell.
Status: historical use only
mae west
An inflatable life preserver. Get it?
Status: deckside humor on senior cruises
mickey
As in, to be slipped a mickey, or—to use the full expression—a Mickey Finn, meaning a drink that’s been laced with a knockout drug or hallucinogen; by extension, a real strong drink. The original Mickey Finn owned the Lone Star Saloon in turn-of-the-century Chicago; he would rather ungraciously sedate his customers in the aforementioned manner, rob them, and dump their unconscious bodies in an alley (but hey, at least he didn’t burke them). The saloon was shut down and Finn convicted in 1903, done in by the testimony of his accomplices, “house girls” Isabelle Fyffe and Mary “Gold Tooth” Thornton.
Status: annoying hipster use
milquetoast
Caspar Milquetoast was everything you might expect from the protagonist of a comic strip entitled Timid Soul, created in 1924 by H. T. Webster.
Status: dated
pinchbeck
Counterfeit, false, cheap, worthless, tawdry. Christopher Pinchbeck was a London watchmaker in the early 1700s who marketed jewelry made out of imitation gold, the alloy of which (lots of copper and a bit of zinc) he developed himself.
Status: used in intellectually elitist periodicals
AFTERWORD
When I was little, my mother told me that the word pumpernickel came from the name of Napoleon’s horse, Nickel. While encamped in Germany, Napoleon’s soldiers complained about the indigestible local black bread. Napoleon responded that his horse liked the stuff well enough. “If it’s bon pour Nickel,” the little Corsican said, “then it’s good for you too.”
Sadly, the tale is utterly apocryphal. The origin for the name likely comes from pumper, a German word meaning “fart.” It is one of many enticing word stories I would have loved to include in the book but couldn’t.
People have postulated that the term jerry-built refers to the handiwork of a Jerry Bros. construction firm that put up exceptionally shoddy housing in late-1800s London, but they offer no proof. Eponym hunters have also searched the world for the first person to be batty and turned up two plausible candidates: one, Jamaican barrister Fitzherbert Batty, declared legally insane in the 1800s; and two, William Battie, eighteenth-century author of A Treatise on Madness. So which is the right one? Neither. The word derives from the phrase “bats in the belfry.”
Historians have cried eponymy to discredit subjects they don’t like. In his work of the 1570s, Perambulation of Kent, William Lambarde wrote that the first harlot was Arlette, mother of William the Conqueror, known to chauvinistic Englishmen as William the Bastard. Lambarde was nursing a grudge over the 1066 Norman invasion but most probably believed the etymology; certainly it has been cited countless times in the four centuries since. However, to look at a passage from Chaucer—“A sturdy harlot went them aye behind, / That was their hoste’s man, and bare a sack, / And what men gave them, laid it on his back”—we see that the word previously meant a different kind of worker.
At least harlot has a reasonable false etymology; other would-be eponyms are plain silly. Condom has been said to derive from either a Dr. Condom, personal physician to King Charles II of England, or the Earl of Condom. There is no Condom in Britain to be an Earl of, nor is Condom a known English surname, although Condon is, which is how the prophylactic was sometimes spelt in the 1700s. But in the earliest extant reference the spelling is quondam, leading to the suggestion that it is derived from the Italian word guantone, which roughly translates to “a big glove.” In short, the etymology is unknown, but hope remains alive that we will find a lusty but careful Mr. Condon out there.
Great long lists of eponyms can be found all over the Internet, some so loaded with counterfeits that more than half the names are phonies. But even one conscientious site has, among hundreds of accurate entries, the apocryphal figures Nathaniel Bigot (said to have been an English Puritan teacher), a Portuguese man named João Marmalado, and Leopold von Asphalt.
My favorite fraud is the esteemed Dominican scholar Domenico da Comma (1260–1316). This Italian monk inserted his namesake commas into the heretofore woefully under-punctuated Bible to make it more readily comprehensible. For his efforts, da Comma was charged with heresy by the Inquisition, who considered his editorial improvement “an affront to God.” If only it were so; the word instead comes from the Greek komma, cut off.
But things are not always so clear, nor is it only the Internet that gets things wrong. Was Nicholas Chauvin a real person? No one knows, but he is almost always cited as such. Thomas Crapper is often thought to belong on da Comma’s list because of a comically grand pseudobiogra
phy, Flushed with Pride, that made him seem entirely made-up. More often than whether a person existed, however, the question is whether we’ve found the right one. For lynch, different reference works definitively support Charles (Encyclopaedia Britannica) and William (Oxford English Dictionary).
Then there’s the question of whether a word is an eponym at all, which often comes down to a matter of personal prejudice. Killjoy etymologists cite antebellum uses of the word hooker in the sense of “prostitute” as gotcha-game proof that the word is noneponymous. But without Hooker’s Division would the term have endured? Lord knows we have enough synonyms to get by. All words—and proper names are words— go back to some earlier word, so to put too much weight on the “original” source is to be simplistic.
Even when eponymy is certain, much else is not. Myths inevitably pop up to fashion people with more direct roles in the creation of what bears their name: The derby was first worn by the Earl of Derby to his horse race (false); Silhouette practiced the art of shade cutting (seems unlikely); Cardigan invented the sweater he and his men wore into battle (almost assuredly not); Saint Audrey had a neck tumor, which is why a gaudy neckerchief was named after her (surprisingly true, or the Venerable Bede is a liar).
In many cases, the legend itself is what’s important. Whether or not Chauvin existed is meaningless for its development as a word. This is true of more than folklore; historians gossip, too, and not just William Batarde. Wanting to show the Bourbon kings to be spineless creatures controlled by their mistresses, nineteenth-century historians inflated Madame de Pompadour’s role in national affairs. In the matter of her enduring fame, the myth of La Pompadour is at least as significant as the woman born Jeanne Antoinette Poisson.
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