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WHO’S IN A NAME?
Etymology can disclose fascinating stories surrounding the
origin or evolution of words. Some of the most captivating accounts are
related to eponyms - common nouns derived from proper nouns, i.e.
names of (real or imaginary) persons or places. These may be words we
use every day, so well integrated in the language that we couldn’t
suspect that once they were just somebody’s name. But it is these
words which do not allow the characters that hide behind them to be
forgotten, telling their story and thus helping them survive within
syllables. You may find below a few English eponyms the stories of
which are worth telling, not only due to their interesting development,
but also because they remind us of special real-life characters. Discover
how they were created, who they stand for and other surprising facts,
such as the relationship between present-day television and Louis XIV
of France, or between sandwiches and gambling.
Next time you need a smoke, take a moment to think about
Jean Nicot (1530-1600), a French diplomat and scholar: both the
tobacco plant (Nicotiana tabaccum) and nicotine, the colorless toxic
substance in the plant which contributes to smoking addiction, were
named after him. Between 1559 and 1561, Nicot served as French
ambassador in Lisbon, Portugal, where he received and planted some
tobacco seeds in the embassy gardens. Tobacco, only snuffed at the
time, was used in Spain and Portugal, but virtually unknown to the rest
of Europe. Although he was not the first to introduce the plant in
France, Nicot actively promoted the use of tobacco, praising its
medicinal properties. He sent powdered leaves to Catherine de’ Medici,
to treat the migraines of her son, the young King Francis II. The Queen
Mother and the French elite instantly became tobacco converts. So did
the Father Superior of Malta, who shared tobacco with his monks.
Nicot’s service to the royal family brought him a title (he
became seigneur de Villemain) and eternal celebrity: tobacco became
wildly popular in France and was called “Nicot’s weed” or “the Queen’s
weed”. In 1752, botanist Carl Linnaeus chose his name to designate the
plant genus in the binomial nomenclature. Nicot is also known for
having compiled the first large corpus of French-Latin dictionaries, an
essential work for French lexicography.
Another important historical figure whose name is now used
on a daily basis is John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792).
According to his biographer, due to the Earl’s commitments to the
navy, politics and arts, the first sandwich is likely to have been eaten
at his desk. However, the popular version of the story, first recorded in
a 1770 travel book, depicts Montagu as an inveterate gambler, who
ordered his valet to bring him cold meat between two slices of bread at
the gaming table. This allowed him to neither interrupt marathon
sessions for a proper meal, nor get the cards greasy while eating with
his bare hands. Essentially, the British statesman was not the inventor
of the sandwich, previously known as ‘bread and meat’ or ‘bread and
cheese’: a 17th century description of Dutch taverns mentions beef
hanging from rafters "which they cut into thin slices and eat with bread
and butter laying the slices upon the butter". However, the Earl’s social
status turned the dish into a culinary trend: people began to order “the
same as Sandwich”, and it was gradually adopted as a late-night meal
by British aristocracy, becoming truly popular with the rise of the
working class in the 19th century as an inexpensive and fast type of
food.
As First Lord of Admiralty, Montagu was a great supporter of
Captain James Cook, who named the Sandwich Islands (currently
Hawaiian Islands) and the South Sandwich Islands (located in the
southern Atlantic) after him. The title Earl of Sandwich stems from the
town in Kent, England, whose Old English name, Sandwicæ, literally
means “trade center on sand”.
A two-version story is also part of the etymology of
maverick. We usually think of a maverick as either a nonconformist,
lone dissenter, or a risk-taking loose cannon. During the US
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presidential campaign of Senator John McCain, acclaimed as a
“political maverick” of the Republicans, the popularity of the word
escalated, but its original meaning, still in use in Southwestern U.S.,
was that of unbranded cattle that strayed from the herd, easily
associated with persons who rebel against accepted ideas. You may
have known this, but do you know how unbranded cattle came to be
called “mavericks”? It all comes down to one man: Samuel Augustus
Maverick (1803-1870), a Texas lawyer, politician and land baron who
did not burn his cattle for identification purposes, against the habit of
the time.
In one version of the story, Maverick’s opposition to animal
cruelty was regarded as independent mindedness by fellow ranchers,
hence the current meaning of the common noun, although some
suspected his refusal was actually a method to claim any unbranded
cows. According to his son, however, Maverick did not refuse branding,
he simply neglected it because he was not interested in ranching. In
1845 he unwillingly became the owner of 400 head of cattle, in
payment of a debt, and left them in the care of an African American
family, who only branded about one third of the animals, and often let
them wander away. Ranchers in the area took advantage of their
carelessness and burned their own brands into the unmarked cattle or
“mavericks”. Maverick’s cattle were eventually sold, but the word stuck,
and so did the linguistic influence of the family: the lawyer’s grandson,
U.S. Congressman Maury Maverick, was the first to use the term
gobbledygook in 1944.
Sometimes the relationship between a common noun and
the person whose name it bears is not as straightforward, because the
history of the word involves several stages in which it had different
meanings, each engendering the next. For instance, the small
microphone you see on TV, attached to the clothing of performers or
speakers in order to allow hands-free operation, is called lavalier
(also known as lav, lapel mic or clip mic). What is the relationship
between this device and the eponymous 17th century duchess? The first
lavalier microphones, which were hung from the neck in the 1930s,
were named after a type of jewelry: in English, a lavalier(e) is also an
ornamental pendant, usually with one stone or chandelier drop, worn
on a chain around the neck. In its turn, this meaning seems to be
derived from the French use of the term, designating a “floppy neck tie
tied to form a bow at the front of the neck”. This kind of tie was
associated by 19th century painters with one of its most famous
promoters: Louise Françoise de La Baume Le Blanc, Duchess of La
Vallière (1644-1710).
Louise became the mistress of French King Louis XIV at the
age of 17. She was reportedly a religious girl, neither extravagant nor
interested in money and titles. Although initially chosen as a diversion
from the dangerous flirtation between Louis and his sister-in-law,
Louise and the King soon fell in love. Their affair lasted six years and
yielded four children, two of which did not survive infancy. She was
eventually replaced by her friend Madame de Montespan, and forced to
live with the King and his new mistress, being the godmother of their
first daughter. The strain of her new life caused Louise to become
increasingly haggard and attempt to flee the palace; it was only after
years of suffering that she was allowed to enter a convent. Louise’s
nephew, the duke of La Vallière, who was a famous bibliophile, is the
source of French adjective lavallière, designating the dead-leaf color of
certain book covers.
Another case where the common noun and the proper name
it derives from seem hard to relate is that of dunce, which refers to “a
person who is stupid or slow to learn”, and John Duns Scotus (c. 1265 1308), one of the most important philosopher-theologians of the High
Middle Ages, referred to as Doctor Subtilis due to his penetrating
thought and subtle distinctions. His works were university textbooks
from the 14th century, influencing both Catholic and secular thought.
Duns was beatified in 1993 and was the founder of Scotism, a
particular form of Scholasticism, which flourished into the 17th century
in Catholic Europe. The scholar’s name comes from Duns, the Scottish
town where he was born.
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December 2013
How did the meaning of the common noun come to oppose
such merits of the eponymous scholar? This dramatic shift is attributed
to 16th century Protestant humanists, who rejected Catholic medieval
theology and discredited Scotus as a sophist and a hairsplitting
scholastic. They started using the term dunse or dunsman, designating
his followers, who opposed the new learning i.e. the King James Bible,
as an insult meaning “one incapable of scholarship”. This meaning
later extended to any dull-witted student and is reflected in dunce cap,
designating a pointed paper hat, often marked with a D or the word
dunce, formerly worn by schoolchildren as punishment for laziness or
misbehavior in class.
Sources:
www.alphadictionary.com/articles/eponyms/
en.wikipedia.org
dictionary.reference.com
atilf.atilf.fr
The case of Duns Scotus illustrates the fact that authorship
frequently leads to eponymy. For example, the origin of the word
sadism is widely acknowledged as related to the famous Marquis de
Sade, but did you know that masochism also derives from the name
of a writer? Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895) was an
Austrian novelist and journalist, born in present-day Ukraine. His best
known work is Venus in Furs, a novella whose characters and themes,
such as female dominance and sadomasochism, are heavily inspired by
the author’s life. In 1869, Sacher-Masoch and his mistress, Baroness
Fanny Pistor, signed a contract which made him her slave for six
months and constrained Pistor to wear furs, especially when in a cruel
mood; the two traveled by train to Venice, with the Baroness in the first
class, and Sacher-Masoch in a third-class compartment, disguised as a
servant named “Gregor”. Their relationship is faithfully reflected in the
novella, where Severin asks Wanda to treat him in increasingly
degrading ways, an idea which she eagerly embraces after some
hesitation, treating her new slave brutally and engaging three African
women to dominate him. Severin describes his feelings during these
episodes as “suprasensuality”.
The term masochism was coined by psychiatrist Richard von
Krafft-Ebing in his 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis, where he
describes “the wish to suffer pain and be subjected to force” and writes:
“I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly «Masochism», because
the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up
to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the
substratum of his writings”.
While the link between the eponymous historical characters
and the above common nouns is undisputed, in some cases there are
several candidates to the origin of a word. One such term is lynch, “to
put to death, especially by hanging, by mob action and without legal
authority”. Its origin is traditionally traced down to Charles Lynch
(1736-1796), a Virginia politician who, as head of an informal court,
imprisoned Loyalist supporters of the British during the American
Revolutionary War, although lacking proper jurisdiction, on grounds of
wartime necessity. He then convinced his friends in the Congress to
pass a law which exonerated him and his associates. Charles Lynch is
said to have described his actions using the phrase Lynch’s Law,
meaning assumption of extrajudicial authority for punishment, which
was adopted as a common Americanism. The Law was used in early
Western settlements to maintain order until a sheriff or a proper court
could be set up, but also served to satisfy the vengeance thirst of mobs.
Another contender is Captain William Lynch (1742-1820),
who around 1780 led a vigilance committee in Pittsylvania County,
Virginia, supposed to keep order there during the Revolutionary War.
In 1811, he claimed to be the source of the phrase Lynch’s Law, by then
famous, which would have appeared in a compact signed by him and
his neighbors to “uphold their own brand of law independent of legal
authority”. However, the obscurity of this compact compared to the
well-known actions of Charles Lynch makes William a less likely
source. A version of the compact, published in 1836, is said to have
been a hoax of Edgar Allan Poe. Finally, the earliest potential source is
James Lynch Fitzstephen, the Mayor of Galway, Ireland, who in 1493
extra-judicially convicted his own son for the murder of a Spanish
visitor, hanging him from the balcony of his house. Fitzstephen is the
least likely to be at the origin of lynch, first recorded in 1835.
I.D.
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December 2013