verb eponyms

[Jonathan Lighter]

I heard this once around 1995 as "give her the Heisman."  It must have been before I reached the coffee machine because my brain could not even begin to figure out what about the Heisman Trophy would have lent it to this application.

So I forgot about it.

Early cites of any of these Heisman slang forms would be welcomed.

JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: verb eponyms
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.


--Ben Zimmer

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