Anonyponymous Read online

  a·non·y·pon·y·mous

  a·non·y·pon·y·mous

  THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE BEHIND EVERYDAY WORDS

  John Bemelmans Marciano

  Copyright © 2009 by John Bemelmans Marciano

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2009928110

  ISBN 978-1-59691-653-1

  First U.S. Edition 2009

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Interior design by Sara E. Stemen

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  For my father

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  A·NON·Y·PON·Y·MOUS

  APPENDIX I

  APPENDIX II

  AFTERWORD

  NOTES

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  The smiling gent you see on the front cover is John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich. If he’s grinning it might be because he’s famous, saved from oblivion by the way he liked to snack, with a slab of salt beef stuffed between two pieces of toast. Or maybe it’s because he’s just won big. The earl was such a degenerate gambler that he once stayed at the wagering tables twenty-four hours straight, which is why he invented the sandwich in the first place—so he wouldn’t have to get up.

  The Earl of Sandwich is famous for being the man behind a word that most people never thought was named after anyone, a man both anonymous and eponymous or, to coin a term, anonyponymous.

  As a word, eponymous is a bit anonymous itself. Its moment in the sun came with the release of REM’s album Eponymous, a subtle dig at musicians who name records after themselves, such as Peter Gabriel, whose first four albums are all entitled Peter Gabriel. In short, an eponym is anything that’s ever been named after anybody. The title of an autobiography, the name of a legal firm, Mercedes-Benz, Washington State—anything.

  But eponymy doesn’t necessarily involve the conscious act of naming. An eponym can also be a word that explodes into the language because of who a person is or what he or she did, often to that person’s dismay. For how this happens, here’s a firsthand account by Dr. Frasier Crane, as told to Sam Malone in an episode of Cheers:

  Frasier, explaining being left at the altar: The story of my humiliation spread like wildfire through the university, and then to the entire Italian countryside. Everyone knew about it, everyone knew about my shame.

  Sam: Naw—you must have been imagining that.

  Frasier: Oh, was I? Do you know that in soccer, when a player kicks at the ball, misses, and falls down, it’s now called a Frasier?

  Sam: That could be a coincidence.

  Frasier: If he’s knocked cold, it’s called a Frasier Crane.

  Names often get used in this type of descriptive shorthand, like with, “That kid’s a real Einstein,” or, “He pulled a Bernie Madoff.” But a name only crosses into true word-hood once it is no longer used as a reference. When we speak of hectoring wives and philandering husbands, it is without a picture of valiant Hector or lover-boy Philander popping into our minds, the way a bespectacled Viennese man with a pipe does when we say “Freudian slip.” To be considered anonyponymous, a word must pass the Viennese pipe test.

  So what are the other criteria? First, that the word be an eponym, the determining of which can present more of a challenge than you might think. Like most New Yorkers, I long believed the Outerbridge Crossing got its name from being the bridge farthest from downtown, and was shocked to learn that it instead honored Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge. Outerbridge is an example of the perfectly well-suited name, or aptronym, and whether a person is eponym or aptronym can be a chicken-or-the-egg proposition. Sometimes a famous name mirrors an existing term and reinforces it, as might have happened with Philadelphia whiskey maker E. G. Booz. There also lurks the possibility of nominative determinism, when someone’s name influences what they become—perhaps what drove Learned Hand to become one of the most influential justices in U.S. history.

  The other half of the equation—the anonymous part—cannot be decided absolutely, as everyone’s know ledge is different. Most readers will know some of the characters in the following pages; the hope is that all the figures will be a surprise for the majority of readers. My editor thought Guy Fawkes had become too familiar due to the V for Vendetta mask, but I had never seen the movie. I since have, but not everyone has made the same mistake. Age is a big dividing line, and what is an eponym to one generation will be an anonyponym for the next. On the brink is a word like hoover, gaining traction as a verb meaning to suck something up. Its vibrant onomatopoeic quality almost assures its continued use among those ignorant of its origins, but I can never get out of my mind that it’s the name of a vacuum manufacturer, so it failed the Viennese pipe test.

  Not everyone who qualifies under the rules made it into the book, of course. In general, I preferred naturally occurring, Frasier Crane–type eponyms, so mythological figures and fictional characters were preferred to inventors and scientists: hence the absence of such delightful names as Henry J. Heimlich (maneuver), Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (burner), and Fernand Lamaze (class). Finally, there were those people who didn’t qualify but I included anyway, such as the Marquis de Sade (because how could I leave out the Marquis de Sade?).

  One person I didn’t feel comfortable bending the rules for was our friend the Earl of Sandwich, who has become famous for his very obscurity. I do, however, want to propose the earl as patron saint of the anonyponymous. His example shows that there is hope for the forgotten figures populating the following pages, that perhaps their lives can also be pulled out of the shadows of history for the wider world to recognize. It’s fair to ask, however, why should they be?

  All words are abstractions. But words also have histories, and by unwinding them, we gain access to the hidden richness of our language. The absolute origins of words are for the most part unknowable; what makes eponyms extraordinary is that we can point to the moment of their birth and to the lives of the people from whom they sprang.

  But why anonyponyms? Blame Etienne de Silhouette. When I looked up the etymology of the word silhouette and saw his name, I thought a virus had somehow infected my copy of the OED. It seemed like a prank, and indeed, Monsieur Silhouette and many of the other folks herein would see their peculiar fame as exactly that. In the anonyponymous, biographical history and the dictionary intersect in the realm of the ridiculous—and also of the remarkable, the delightful, and the fascinating.

  I hope you enjoy these words and the people behind them as much as I have.

  A·NON·Y·PON·Y·MOUS

  al·go·rithm n. A set of rules for solving a problem.

  No, the first anonyponymous person in the book is not Al Gore.

  When a word begins with al-, there’s a good chance it comes from Arabic. This is true with alchemy, almanac, alcove, alcohol (ironically), and algorithm, named for Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, or, as his Latin translators called him, Algorismus.

  In the early ninth century Baghdad was fast becoming the world’s most important center of trade and learning, and while engaged at its illustrious House of Wisdom, al-Khwarizmi produced his most famous work, The Book of Restoring and Balancing. In it, al-Khwarizmi explained
how to solve complex mathematical equations by a method called al-jabr, Arabic for “reunion of broken parts,” which came rendered in Latin as “algebra.” (See about those al- words?) On an even more basic level, al-Khwarizmi was instrumental in the spread of Arabic numerals. Not that he invented them, nor did anyArab; the symbols originated on the Indian subcontinent in the centuries leading up to Christ.

  The set of rules laid down by al-Khwarizmi for working with these fancy Hindu number signs was so revolutionary that his name came to mean arithmetic, first in the Arab world, and then in the form algorism throughout the West. But this wouldn’t happen until al-Khwarizmi’s books were finally translated into Latin, about three hundred years after he wrote them, an indication of just how far the Christian world lagged behind the Muslim one during the intellectual deep freeze of the Middle Ages. Roman numerals—a system invented for notching sticks—didn’t get replaced by Hindu-Arabic ones until the mid-1500s.

  bou·gain·vil·lea n. A kind of flowering vine.

  Louis-Antoine de Bougainville set sail in late 1766 attempting to become the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe. Along for the ride was botanist Philibert Commerçon and the young man he had hired as his valet for the trip, Jean Bonnefoy. Bonnefoy was both dedicated and tireless, trekking everywhere with Commerçon and turning into quite a talented botanist himself. Among the many plants they discovered was one they found in Brazil, a climbing, flowering shrub that Commerçon named in his admiral’s honor.

  Still, the most celebrated stop on the trip wasn’t South America but the South Pacific, specifically Tahiti, first revealed to the wider world in Bougainville’s later writings. Bougainville described the island as a kind of earthly paradise peopled by noble savages uncorrupted by civilization. Uncorrupted, maybe, but not fools. When they saw Commerçon’s young assistant, they immediately knew what the crew hadn’t yet figured out, namely, that he was a she.

  Jean Bonnefoy was in fact Jeanne Baret. Tearfully, the young woman explained to Bougainville that she’d adopted her drag persona in order to make a living after the death of her parents. Hearing all the hoopla surrounding Bougainville’s trip, she approached Commerçon with an offer to serve as his valet. Despite sharing a cabin with her (unusual for a master and servant in those days), Com-mer çon never managed to figure out her gender. Bougainville wasn’t bothered by the ruse and punished no one, but the admiral hadn’t heard the real story. Commerçon had known all along about Baret—he’d apparently hired her two years before the voyage as his housekeeper, and had even placed her in his will. Were they lovers? No one knows for sure, but they certainly spent a lot of time inside that cabin together.

  In any event, Bougainville’s convoy arrived home to Brittany in 1769 with Jeanne Baret aboard, making her the first woman of any nationality to circumnavigate the globe.

  AMESNAY OF OWERSFLAY

  To describe and categorize every living thing was the main mission in life of Carolus Linnaeus, the most prolific namer in history. Living in the eighteenth century toughened Linnaeus’s task, as discoveries were daily rolling in from every corner of the globe. To keep up, the brainy Swede and his fellow botanists named many of the new plants after people. To fit into Linnaeus’s system of nomenclature, an -ia was added to honorees’ surnames in a kind of scientific pig Latin. (The Swede’s own real name: Karl Lineé.)

  Botanists sometimes honored their patrons, as Philibert Commerçon had with Bougainville, but mostly they just honored each other. To give you some idea: Linnaeus named the zinnia after German botanist Johann Zinn and the gardenia after Scottish-American botanist Alexander Garden (an aptronym if ever there was one), plus the little-known plumeria after Charles Plumier, a French botanist who in turn honored his countrymen Michel Bégon and Pierre Magnol as well as an important German botanist of an earlier generation, Leonhart Fuchs.

  Madame Hortense Lepaute, on the other hand, was not a botanist but an astronomer; she owes her floral honor to Commerçon, ever willing to help out a lady in a man’s world.

  FORSYTHIA

  FUCHSIA

  HORTENSIA

  A Floral Sampling

  Michel Bégon

  Louis-Antoine de Bougainville

  Anders Dahl

  William Forsyth

  Friedrich Freese

  Leonhart Fuchs

  Alexander Garden

  Hortense Lepaute

  Pierre Magnol

  Joel Poinsett

  Caspar Wistar

  Johannann Zinn

  bowd·ler·ize v. To omit or change material considered vulgar, offensive, or otherwise unseemly.

  I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world’s greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter.

  —FROM THE PREFACE TO THE Family Shakespeare

  Thomas Bowdler was a wealthy English gentleman who studied medicine but never practiced, preferring to devote his life to prison reform, playing chess, and providing the world with offense-free Shakespeare. The first volume of the Family Shakespeare saw the light of day in 1807, with editorial changes ranging from the trivial to the silly—as in replacing the exclamation “God!” with “Heavens!” (great for the old iambic pentameter) or putting “Out crimson spot!” for “Out damned spot.” But some were indeed significant, as when Hamlet’s beloved Ophelia dies not as a suicide but the victim of an accidental drowning.

  Although the idea of changing the Bard’s words seems unspeakably presumptuous today, in Bowdler’s time the plays of Shakespeare had yet to acquire the status of holy works. In fact, most were already performed in altered versions, the restoration of his works not occurring until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Already in Shakespeare’s own time actors and stage directors were cutting large swaths of text and tampering with scenes: It’s just that, before Bowdler, they tended to play up the naughty bits. For this reason the most popular of Shakespeare’s works was long Richard III; audiences just loved Colley Cibber’s “blood-and-thunder” version of the play.

  With the dawn of the uptight Victorian era, the Family Shakespeare became a bestseller and mainstay of the middle-class home, but no matter its success, Mr. Bowdler became a figure of ridicule. His critics got the final word—by coining one after him.

  Ironically, though, Bowdler didn’t even do his own hatchet work. Bowdler’s sister was his ghost editor—in fact, the 1807 edition was her handiwork entirely. The reason her name couldn’t appear on the book, it seems, is that it wasn’t considered proper for a lady to come into contact with such lewd and vulgar material.

  boy·cott n. A protest effected by refusing to patronize, attend, or in any way support the existence of.

  After life as a captain in the British army, a cush job in the Irish countryside must have sounded pretty good to Charles Boycott. But he had no idea what he was signing up for when he became land agent for the County Mayo estates of Lord Erne. Things went well at first, until a bad harvest across Ireland in 1879 sowed fears of a second potato famine. This led to the formation of the Land League, a nationalist organization that promised action against anyone who served writs of eviction against Irish tenant farmers. When Boycott started doing just that, he became the league’s first target. Savvy of public opinion, the league proceeded in a nonviolent mode, directing the community to ostracize Boycott: No shop would serve him, the postman stopped delivering his mail, and even his church congregation gave him the deep freeze. The British government, outraged by Irish temerity, paid for upwards of a thousand men of the Royal Irish Constabulary to protect the fifty scabs Boycott hired to bring in Lord Erne’s crops.

  The potatoes were successfully harvested, albeit at a reported cost of nearly thirty times what they were worth (a poor calculus even by current U.S. farm-policy standards). Boycott left the Emerald Isle before Christmas and the following year Prime Minister William Gladstone introduced legislation that secured all of the basic rights the Land League sought, rendering the first boyco
tt a smashing success.

  brag·ga·do·cio n. Unwarranted boasting, usually male.

  In Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–1596), Braggadocchio is a dishonorable knight who steals the horse of the Knight of Temperance: “Vaine Braggadocchio getting Guyons horse is made the scorne / Of knighthood trew.” The Faerie Queene was an epic poem greatly indebted to Italian works like Orlando Furioso. Because of this, and because it was an allegorical work, Spenser came up with an Italian-sounding name for his vainglorious knight based on the English word brag. (Spenser wasn’t much into subtlety.) For some odd reason, the pseudo-Italian name Braggadocchio has taken on the pseudo-Spanish spelling braggadocio. In any event, the word is a purely English concoction.

  car·di·gan n. A jacketlike sweater fastened with buttons or a zipper.

  Theirs not to make reply,

  Theirs not to reason why,

  Theirs but to do and die:

  Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  Wearing their cardigan sweaters.

  The Charge of the Light Brigade, immortalized in the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, was a big fat mistake. A miscommunicated order during the Crimean War’s Battle of Balaclava (1854) led to a cavalry assault so foolhardy that the enemy Russian troops thought the onrushing Brits had to be drunk. The doomed but brave sally sparked the English imagination in a romantic period when the doomed but brave was much celebrated. (Tennyson’s “Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava,” about a more successful cavalry action, was far less of a hit.)

  The leader of the charge managed to make it through unscathed and went home to England a hero, an unlikely outcome for James Thomas Brudenell, the seventh Earl of Cardigan. Cardigan had risen through the army via family connections and purchasing commissions; he certainly didn’t do it by being an upstanding citizen or military man, having led a scandalous home life with wives and mistresses and winding up in court on numerous occasions for egregiously overreacting to the supposed transgressions of subordinates.