New eponym

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Aug 12 19:51:20 UTC 2009


Aaarrrggghhh! I've been Horned again! Give credit where credit is due! :-)

-Wilson

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: New eponym
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
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-----
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