New eponym

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:16 AM -0700 8/12/09, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>On Aug 11, 2009, at 8:21 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>
>>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
>
>going back some years, there's Paul Simon's "A Simple Desultory
>Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)", with
>plenty of passive eponymous verbs (referring to political, military,
>and artistic figures).  there are two recorded versions (from 1965 and
>1966), with somewhat different names in them.
>
>arnold

Arggh!  I've been Zwickied again!!!!


LH

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