eponym in today's NYT Magazine

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sun, 22 May 2005 12:03:51 -0400, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
wrote:

>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".

Here's a new application of the eponym, inspired by Tom Cruise's bizarre
appearance on "Oprah"...

-----
http://www.defamer.com/

Everybody’s Doing The Cruise!
An operative informs us that at last night’s special preview of The
Island, suited agent and studio exec-types were seen “falling to one knee
and pulling in their arms and punching the ground and/or doing the
two-handed arm grab with one another—all in imitation of Cruise on Oprah.”
You heard it here: Everyone’s doing the Cruise! Engage your closest
cubicle-mate in some two-handed wrestling, throw your arms in the air
(pretending that you just don’t care is optional) and yelp about the
intensity of your feelings for each other, jump up and down on your boss’s
couch—hell, go fucking nuts and pin your assistant’s hands behind her back
and march her around the office like a grudging love-slave. You won’t want
to be left out of the new sensation Cruising across the Hollywood nation!
-----


--Ben Zimmer