verb eponyms

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:00 AM -0700 9/21/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>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

I wonder if the famous incident(s?) in which Desmond Howard, wide
receiver at the U. of Michigan, struck the Heisman pose after scoring
a touchdown to promote his own candidacy for the award--together with
the fact that he did in fact win it, in 1991--contributed to raising
the profile of that pose for lexical as well as commercial purposes.

larry

>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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