verb eponyms

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:13 PM -0400 9/20/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Tue, 20 Sep 2005 19:57:05 -0400, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>>>On Sep 18, 2005, at 19:51, Tom Kysilko wrote:
>>>>While driving around today I heard someone on NPR claim that the
>>>>only verb eponyms she could think of without "linguistic
>>>>decoration", i.e. without affixes such as -ize, were "Bork" and
>>>>"Bobbit".[...]
>>>>Can anyone think of any others?
>>
>>Of course if deictic/on-line examples are admitted, the process is
>>actually richly productive, as shown by Eve & Herb Clark ("When Nouns
>>Surface as Verbs", _Language_ 1979; cf. their discussion of "to
>>Houdini") and Simon & Garfunkel ("A Simple Desultory Philippic"):
>>
>>(Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)
>>I been Norman Mailered, Maxwell Taylored.
>>I been John O'Hara'd, McNamara'd.
>>I been Rolling Stoned and Beatled till I'm blind.
>[etc.]
>
>Along the same lines is the late-'80s/early-'90s college slang expression,
>"to be/get Heismaned" = 'to have one's advances rejected by an object of
>desire, as if by the stiff-armed stance depicted on the Heisman Trophy".
>"Heisman" could also appear as an active verb, but more commonly it would
>be "give (someone) the Heisman". Connie Eble's _Slang and Sociability_ has
>the intransitive "do the Heisman", apparently popularized in a song by the
>group Johnny Quest.
>
And not that long ago both the verb "to Lewinsky"/"to {be/get}
Lewinskied", as well as the periphrasis "to do a Lewinsky", were
fairly easy to decode.

L