To the memory of my friend Dennis O’Hare, who would have appreciated the humour. RIP
My thanks go to Michelle Signore and all at John Blake Publishing; my agent Mark Stanton; the staff of The Scotsman Publications library; the staff at the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, Central and Moredun Libraries in Edinburgh, and the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.
My greatest debt of gratitude goes to my wife and children for putting up with my absences when in writing mode, and my moods when not absent, and also to my mother for the use of the office (again) and her love and support these last 52 years.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
PREFACE
1 HEROES AND VILLAINS – DEFINING QUALITIES
2 SITE AND SOUND
3 HONOUR BOUND
4 IMMACULATE CONCEPTIONS
5 LAYING DOWN THE LAW
6 NATURAL SELECTION
7 ALL IN THE BEST POSSIBLE TASTE
8 NAME, SET AND MATCH
EPONYMOUS LISTS
INDEX
Copyright
Admit it – you have no real idea who Tam O’Shanter or Harvey Wallbanger were. But you’re interested enough to have got this far – so read on and prepare to be entertained and enlightened in equal measure.
The fact that we mark people’s achievements is a very human activity. Other species have kings and queens, pack leaders and stand-out individuals, but they are not commemorated in stone, ink or through oral history. Only the human race idolises its own.
There are statues and paintings of famous and not-so-famous people all over the world. Politicians and pop stars sometimes have airports named after them, while local worthies across the globe will be granted the honour of being forever remembered by having a street named after them. Sports stars will perhaps lend their name to a stadium, while royalty will be commemorated on the sides of ships or in the titles of charities.
Yet, for a comparatively few people, there is an honour, deserved or otherwise, which is much more lasting and can often become part of day-to-day language. Put simply, their name becomes all or part of an eponym. When it happens, for good or ill, that person gains a form of immortality, for their entry into common usage will be recorded in dictionaries and lexicons.
Eponyms are words which gain their meaning from a name, usually that of a person. They occur in most languages, but English is very good at nurturing them. Due mainly to its supremacy in science, business and worldwide culture, the English language is global, vibrant and living. It is constantly being reinvented and developed by absorption from myriad sources across the planet.
Since ‘modern’ English was first structured in the Middle Ages, words from different languages have been imported and adapted over the centuries, and have vastly enriched English. Human invention has also changed the language – neologisms (newly coined words or phrases) happen all the time in a fast-moving, developing world, although some die out very quickly.
Eponyms, however, stand apart. They are a word form which relies on a name, whether that name comes from a real person such as an inventor or discoverer, or from a fictional, legendary or mythical character. They are widespread and, consequently, one of the commonest phrases in modern usage is ‘the eponymous …’ We usually know what ‘the eponymous’ means – that an item, or a quality, described either by a phrase or single word, has been given the name of some person, real or fictitious.
It seems simple – Churchillian means ‘like Winston Churchill’, while the Ali Shuffle or Fosbury Flop, for instance, get their names from the great sportsmen who invented these manoeuvres. A Harvey Wallbanger may – or may not – have been named after a surfer called Harvey who downed several of the cocktails and started bashing into the walls of a bar in Los Angeles; more of that later. A Tam O’Shanter also gets its name from a chap who had drunk too much, a character created by Scotland’s greatest poet, Robert Burns.
Simple, yes, but the eponym is one of the most fascinating and complex instances of how language, and especially the English language, gains new words. The extraordinary evolution of English over the centuries has been the subject of many books and, in every book, the story of English is never less than complex. This book will be no different – to understand eponyms, very often you have to know or learn about subjects ranging from medieval Christianity to 20th-century cooking. That’s because eponyms have a history all of their own, although few people champion them because they are so much part of our everyday usage of the language. Which is a pity, because there are marvellous stories lurking behind virtually every single one of them.
The aim of this book is to gather as many of those stories as possible. As well as examining the phenomenon that is the eponym, this book will show how they developed in English usage and changed the language in doing so. What’s more, we’ll have some fun along the way, because language is never less than dynamic and often endlessly surprising.
Eponyms have staying power; precious few people know anything about Niccolo Machiavelli of Florence who died in 1527 but, nearly five centuries later, we all understand ‘machiavellian’ to describe a cynical and opportunistic philosophy. It is used ever more frequently in these mendacious days, but the word was already in use before the man himself died.
New eponyms crop up constantly but, like so many neologisms, they should be given no real credence unless they are still in use, say a decade later. That is why, in Harvey Wallbangers and Tam O’Shanters, in all but a few exceptional circumstances, the ‘cut-off’ date for coining will be 2001 as any eponyms minted after that date are still too young.
I will not differentiate, as some grammarians do, between so called ‘true’ and ‘pseudo’ eponyms. The former is usually seen as a word in which the original ‘name’ has been replaced by an understanding that has a life of its own – ‘boycott’ or ‘hooliganism’, for example.
‘Pseudo-eponyms’ are usually taken to be names applied to objects or ideas, such as Reaganomics or Thatcherism, or to scientific and medical terms such as Parkinson’s Disease. These eponyms are just as deserving of consideration as the ‘true’ eponym, and the main difference appears to be whether lexicologists give an eponym an initial letter that is upper or lower case – a form of snobbery, a word which itself is arguably an eponym drawn from WM Thackeray’s Book of Snobs. Nevertheless, almost all company names, advertising and branding eponyms – e.g. the Winalot dog, the Emirates Stadium – will be omitted, if only on grounds of good taste.
Some forms of eponym can also derive from the names of places or things, but this book concentrates on eponyms that gain their definition from people, be they real or fictional – after all, a fictional character can make for a very interesting story. That’s why I have also included a small section on ‘place-name’ eponyms, principally because of the stories behind them.
Not every