eponym in today's NYT Magazine

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun May 22 16:03:51 UTC 2005


No, not "emoticon" in Safire's column, from ol' Smiley-face, Emo D. Kahn.

But this, from p. 52, Alex Witchel's article about the appropriately
rich and thin Hollywood author Gigi Levangie Grazer, who in her
"private" life traded up from her first husband, an impecunious blues
musician, to her second, a producer worth hundreds of millions of
dollars.  Her recent book is described this way:
=======
"The Starter Wife" tells the story of Gracie Pollock, the wife of a
studio executive forced to remake her life after her husband
"Cruises" her.  ("Cruised" is a term Grazer coined when it was
reported that Tom Cruise filed for divorce from Nicole Kidman right
before their 10-year anniversary.  In California, if a couple have
been married for 10 years or more, it is possible for an ex-spouse to
petition the court for financial support during the remainder of his
or her life.)

=======
--Larry, who figures that context will do a pretty good job
disambiguating the potential homonymy confusion between "X cruised Y"
and "X Cruised Y".



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