An Irish land agent whose tenants refused to work for him, serve him or speak to him in County Mayo in 1880 (1880)
Captain Charles Boycott, agent to Lord Erne; the Land League tactic spread with his name attached
General knowledge · Words & language
Eponyms
Greek epōnumos, 'giving one's name to'
Etymology — words made out of people
Ordinary words that began as somebody's name. English is thick with them: a gambling earl gave his name to a snack, an ostracised Irish land agent to a form of protest, a trapeze artist to a garment, and a French finance minister so mean that cheap outline portraits were named after him. Some honour their owner, some mock him, and a few belong to people who never existed. The Greek original described the Athenian archon whose name was used to date the year.
How to spot them
- ▸A person's name that has slipped into lower case
- ▸Cardigan, raglan and balaclava all come from the same war
- ▸The victim was an Irish land agent in County Mayo in 1880
- ▸The doctor lent his name to a machine he did not invent and did not approve of
Key facts
The 4th Earl of Sandwich, who wanted to eat without leaving the gaming table
John Montagu; the story is contemporary but may owe as much to his desk as his card table
A French trapeze artist of the 1860s whose one-piece costume kept his name
Jules Léotard, subject of the song 'The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze'
A French finance minister of 1759, so notorious for economy that the cheapest kind of portrait was named after him (1759)
Étienne de Silhouette, controller-general under Louis XV
A Massachusetts governor signed off an electoral district in 1812 that was said to look like a salamander (1812)
Elbridge Gerry, later Vice-President of the United States
The French ambassador to Portugal who sent tobacco to the court of Catherine de' Medici in 1560 (1560)
Jean Nicot; the plant genus Nicotiana is named for him too
A Belgian instrument maker who patented a brass body with a single reed in 1846 (1846)
Adolphe Sax
The physician who cleaned up Shakespeare for family reading in 1807, with the help of his sister (1807)
Thomas Bowdler, and in fact largely Henrietta Maria Bowdler; The Family Shakspeare
Key ideas
- Eponyms preserve reputations that the facts do not always support. Guillotin campaigned against the death penalty and merely proposed a swifter machine; Boycott was the target of the tactic, not its inventor; and Chauvin may never have existed at all.
Quick-fire facts
- •The word comes from Greek epōnumos; the eponymous archon of Athens gave his name to the year
- •Cardigan is named for the 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade; raglan for the 1st Baron Raglan, who lost an arm at Waterloo
- •The mackintosh is named for the chemist Charles Macintosh, whose own name has no k
- •Biro is from the Hungarian journalist László Bíró; diesel from Rudolf Diesel
- •Dunce comes from the medieval theologian John Duns Scotus, whose followers were mocked by humanists
- •Maverick comes from Samuel Maverick, a Texas rancher who declined to brand his cattle
- •Shrapnel is named for Lieutenant-General Henry Shrapnel, who devised his exploding shell in the 1780s
- •Chauvinism is named for Nicolas Chauvin, a probably legendary Napoleonic soldier
- •Mesmerise comes from Franz Anton Mesmer and his theory of animal magnetism
- •The guillotine is named for Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who proposed it as a humane method and opposed capital punishment; his family later changed their surname
Drill it — 9 cards
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Sources
- Julia Cresswell — The Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins
- David Crystal — The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language