New eponym

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 9:20 PM, Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> At 5:59 PM -0700 8/11/09, Mark Peters wrote:
>>Lindsey Graham coined a vivid expression recently, saying, "My
>>message to my Democratic colleagues is: We made mistakes in Iraq,
>>let's not Rumsfeld Afghanistan. Let's not do this thing on the
>>cheap."
>>(http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/09/ftn/main5227993.shtml)
>>Political eponyms--like Clintonista, Jeffersonian, Bushism--are
>>pretty common. I can think of plenty of nouns and adjectives, but
>>can anyone think of political eponymic verbs that work like
>>Rumsfeld? I'm doing a column on Rumsfelding this week, and I
>>appreciate any leads. I just hope I don't Rumsfeld the article. Mark
>
> Would "boycott" count?  It certainly has political applications and
> it's also pretty clearly eponymic.  And of course "pander", although
> that one had a non-political origin.

Well, there's always "Bork". And there have been various ad-hoc
eponymic verbs on the "Bork" model, usually expressed in the passive
-- "Soutered", "Miered", and most recently, "Sotomayored":

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002594.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-frisch/forget-being-borked-shes_b_241218.html

--Ben Zimmer

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