It’s considerably more Dickensian than Blagojevich, that’s for sure. Kathleen Parker said in the Washington Post last Wednesday:

Among his other activities, Blagojevich — whose Dickensian name rings nearly eponymous — allegedly has been busy trying to get certain members of the Tribune’s editorial board fired by threatening to withhold state assistance for the financing or sale of Wrigley Field (Tribune also owns the Chicago Cubs).

I’m REALLY not sure what she means by “rings nearly eponymous”.

Agreed, Ridger. One characteristic of eponyms we use today—boycott, bowdlerize, maverick, as examples—are (like, oh, at least a handful of words in the language) pronounceable. Machiavellian and Celsius give us a challenge, yes, but we can still get them out of our mouths without counting the syllables and mentally watching where our tongues go as we slog through the syllables in slow motion, as we would do with Dag-nab-o-glitch, or however it’s pronounced. I believe we should all pronounce the eventual near-eponym with a Jerry Lewis jabber, the way Jon Stewart does.

And what would a Dag-nab-o-glitch be, anyway? Someone who tries to sell political appointments? Someone who attempts outrageous indiscretions and denies them equally outrageously? A hairstyle that protects your face like an awning?

I would suggest that we brohaugh the notion (mock with silly suggestions), except for that little pronounceability factor . . . and the fact that the meaning wouldn’t be significantly different from “stewarting the notion.”

Let me use this as a jumping-off point for some verbal silliness on The Daily Show last week. Stewart shows a clip of an unnamed reporter referring to the DagwoodSand-o-Wich affair as:

This political drama played out on the national stage is much more than that. It’s human soap opera, as a matter of fact.

Stewart responds, “I see. So this would be like a soap opera except—and this would be the twist—with human roles.” As a matter of fact.

As a capper, the unnamed reporter is jabbering over a display of the words “GOVERNOR’S FAMILY FUED.”

Check out the episode of the Daily Show, enjoy this and some other wordplay there (the czar schtick is fun), and then join me in wondering: What the hell does “nearly eponymous” mean?

I did see an elegant literary reference to the punnish potential of the name recently, though. In his Time.com article “How I Got Screwed by Bernie Madoff,” Robert Chew writes:

Of course, we never heard the name Madoff — which has a peculiarly Dickensian ring now . . .

Poor investing, Mr. Chew, but some damn good phrasing.

Me, I’m going not for the literary but for the cheap shots. Says the Ponz,
“Made-Ay!”

An inventor, a Philadelphia entrepreneur, a doctor, and a Civil War general walk into a bar.

The barkeep says, “What can I get you gentlemen?”

“I’d like some of me,” says the Philadelphia entrepreneur.

The general nods. “One of me, as well. Two if you know where I might find me.”

“Good idea,” agrees the doctor. “And since I’ll be accompanying the good general, I’d like to purchase a couple of me, as well.”

The bartender says, “What the hell are you guys talking about?”

“Oh, never mind,” huffs the entrepreneur. “Just give me some rotgut whiskey.”

The general says, “Know where I can find a prostitute?”

“And do you sell prophylactics here?” says the doctor.

The bartender is appalled. “We don’t have any of those things here, gentlemen!”

“None at all?” the inventor says finally. He angrily spits out, “Me!”

The bartender is agitated by now. “Just who do you guys think you are, anyway?”

Says the entrepreneur: “I’m Philadelphia distiller E.C. Booz.”

The military man stiffly says, “I am Union General Joseph Hooker.”

Says the doctor, “Dr. Condom here.”

When the bartender insists that no me’s are available at his establishment, the inventor snaps again, “Oh me!”

The bartender looks at the inventor. “’Me!’? Don’t tell me . . . you’re the inventor of the Valveless Water Waste Preventer.”

“Thomas Crapper at your service!”

That little tale is as fictional as the etymologies involving the characters’ names. Supposedly, these mostly real persons lent their names to the items they were seeking in the bar. However, we knew of booze long before the coincidentally (and perhaps fortuitously intentionally) named whiskey distiller E.C. Booz sold hooch in the cabin-shaped bottles of the early and mid 1800s. There’s no evidence of a Dr. Condom, though the device is often said to be named after said 17th- or 18th-Century physician. Prostitutes were called hookers before the army of loose-moraled General Hooker was accompanied by concubine camp followers, and the word crap was in use before Mr. Crapper developed a patent for a toilet flushing device in 1882.

Now, my first draft of this story was quite a bit bawdier, but I bowdlerized it to make it more suitable for a family audience, employing the process that was indeed named after a real person, Thomas Bowdler, famous for his editing Shakespeare into G-rated productions in The Family Shakespeare in 1818 (“To G or to PG—that is the question”). Yes, a number of words result from surnames of persons both real and otherwise.

Keep this rule in mind: If the person’s name makes you snicker, it’s unlikely that the name was the source of our present word. If the supposed source person’s name is boring, the etymology is more likely to be correct: Mr. Bowdler (bowdlerize); the Speverend Rooner—er, the Reverend William Spooner (spoonerism, from around the turn of the 20th Century); the fictional Mrs. Malaprop (malapropism from an 1830 play); Union General Ambrose Everett Burnside (burnsides, and later sideburns in a delightful syllable swap, from the 1800s); Nicolas Chauvin (chauvinism, from the mid 1800s); Thomas Derrick (derrick, because his name became associated with his tool, the gallows); Capt. Charles Cunningham Boycott (self-explanatory, from around 1880); Capt. Charles Lynch (self-explanatory, from the early 1800s)*; Louis Pasteur (pasteurize, late 1800s); Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry (gerrymander, early 1800s); James Thomas Brudenell (the Earl of Cardigan, who likely was not wearing a sweater while he led the legendary Charge of the Light Brigade, but still got one named after his stomping grounds).

Two challenges to the “boring” rule, however, are the shepherd hero of a 16th-Century poem who gave us the name of something the Civil War general sought to prevent with the device of the good doctor (the poem being “Syphilis, sive morbus Gallicus”), and the real-life Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, who advocated use of one of the garments the Civil War general would seek to invade—the bloomer dress, or bloomers.

* If you want your name to become an active word in the English Language, it apparently helps if you change your first name to “Capt. Charles.”

Apparently Spanish explorers asked, “What’s the name of this region?” And the local Mayans responded by saying, “Yuk ak atan,” which means, “I don’t understand.” And so the Spanish named the place Yucatan. They named the place “I Don’t Understand”! If ever there were a more perfect summary of colonialism, I do not know of it.

Well, Rachel still does not know of it. On hearing this claim, my etymological Spidey-sense began tingling, because the tale has bullshitternet notymology written (and mapped) all over it. It sounded like a number of nonsense derivations I mock in Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. Everything you know about cartography is wrong, too.

There are a number of theories of how Yucatan took its name, and Language Log, quick to the fore, discusses them and other fallacies and misinterpretations perpetrated by The Atlas of True Names. The Yuca-yarn is very much in the spirit of other canards as the kangaroo taking its name from, again, natives responding “I don’t understand” to a naming question. The logical fallacy is that such explanations imply that the one and only time explorers heard “I don’t understand” as a response was when asking one specific question. How were all the other questions answered?

I’m fascinated by one “I don’t know” etymological response that likely is kinda-sorta true, however. At Language Log, Benjamin Zimmer writes:

Similarly, the story that the name of the Alaskan town of Nome comes from a phrase meaning “I don’t know” (ki-no-me) goes back to 1905 at least. A 1901 letter by George Davidson (recently noted here by Jon Weinberg) provides another popular theory, that the map notation ? Name was misread as C. Nome (for Cape Nome). (The Nome Convention and Visitor Bureau accepts this derivation.)

Some native Alaskan likely did not say “I don’t know,” but some cartographer likely did admit he/she didn’t know by writing “? Name.” Either way, all dunnos lead to Nome.

One of the stock characters in commedia dell’ arte was Pantalone, generally a miserly, leering patrician codger. Apparently, Pantalone was Venetian; the patron saint of Venice was St. Pantaleone, and Venetians were known as Pantalonis by association with their saint. On stage, the Pantalone stereotype generally wore tight-fitting legwear that came to be known as pantaloons. (I sometimes wonder if that’s why pantaloons and eventually pants are in the plural—ultimately a misinterpretation of the possessive Pantalone’s, perhaps?—but I suspect that on the evidence of breeches and trousers, the plural comes from the fact that humans generally have more than one leg.)

The specific type of tight-fitting trousers were called pantaloons in the 1600s, and by the 1700s the word was applied to trousers (as opposed to knee breeches) in general. By the mid 1830s, the word had been shortened to pants (unrelated to the pants Pantalone did when leering at the female characters).

So wear your pants knowing that they have their origins in making light of old folk (and in fact the word pantaloon by the 1600s meant “old codger”). And men, keep your pants on lest you be accused of being a dirty old man like the commedia dell’ arte dirty old man who kept his pants on. (Particularly good advice for men in England, where pants are underwear.)

Finally, if you’re like me, facing more gray hair than I like in places I like even less, growing old should not scare the pants off you. It should scare the pants onto you.

I’m going to first indirectly pick on my friend JohnnyB, who is a bit zany and has himself taken to the stage to perform comedy (all this will tie together—I promise). Johnny’s very name (without the B) is implicit in zaniness, because Johns of the world, you have further reason to take offense.

First there’s that slang for “one who partakes in prostitutes” slang. Then there’s that euphemism for toilet. And now, another offense, one not so obvious. A long time ago, John was portrayed as a clown. He was zany. Literally.

The word zany traces back (through Middle French) to an Italian theatre form called “Commedia dell’ arte,” a partially improvised farce using broad stock characters wearing masks. Among the form’s many stock characters (blowhard, geezer, girl-chaser, lovers, harlequin) is the wacky, clownish servant. Zanni. Clownish Zanni. Zany Zanni. And Zanni is a regional familiar version of Giovanni . . . or John.

By the early 1600s the word came to adjective use, first meaning “ridiculous” and then taking on the meaning of “crazy, outlandish.”

So when you call someone zany, you are invoking the insulting portrayal of that John Fool, though anyone named John would have to be really zany to actually worry about it.

(Commedia dell’ arte also gave us the name of piece of clothing generally worn by Johns, zany or otherwise, but that’s a musing for another day.)

In a previous post, I wrote about the familial heirs to the name “Maverick,” one of the surnames that have led to now-common English eponyms—that is, words resulting from proper names. Modern-day Mavericks (the ones legally named, in upper-case letters) have chafed against McCain/Palin stealing an important part of the Mavericks’ proud family history for political purposes.

Even though the Mavericks aren’t “the mainstream media,” Sarah Palin probably considers their vocal disdain as suppression of Palin’s own freedom of speech. Their opinions, you see, apparently violate her First Amendment rights.

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

Gov. Palin obviously has not read the Bill of Rights, you betcha.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Questioning is not abridgement. Opinions are not abridgement. Dictionaries aren’t scarce (nor is the text of the Constitution inaccessible).

So, please, Gov. Palin, do not consider my questioning your negative campaigning against the Constitution as eroding the First Amendment; instead view it as my celebrating it, exercising it, wallowing joyfully in the freedom of it. There are nations where the government can coerce the press to shut up. America is not one of them. Perhaps you can look such facts up on Wikipedia.

Though I wish I could say that Gov. Palin was correct in her self-characterization as maverick, at least in the context of her interpretations of the Constitution, such interpretations seem to be very much following the branded-cattle path established by the Cheney-Bush Orwellian disregard for our most important treasure (quick example, “Wiretapping Is Freedom”).

Thus, because of the McCain/Palin abuse of the word maverick and because of Palin’s desire to continue the Bush Administration’s degradation of the Constitution, I would be pleased if the word lovers and freedom lovers who visit this space go to the polls Nov. 4, and substitute the eponym maverick with a stronger eponym—the one taken from Capt. Charles Cunningham Boycott—and captain-charles their candidacy.

When asked whether she and her husband had any more unusual names up their sleeves, the politician [Sarah Palin] said: ‘We did. We never got to get our Zamboni in. I always wanted a son named Zamboni.’

Her husband Todd, however, seemed less than impressed with the suggestion. ‘I don’t think that would have flied,’ he said.

What wouldn’t have “flied”? Zamboni the name or Zamboni the machine? This sounds a bit like Henry Ford naming his son after a car—the Edsel. (Yes, I know it was the opposite—Edsel the human came before the premiere of My Son the Car starring Jerry Van Dyke, or something like that.)

I’ll give Palin the gov a pass on the Zamboni name claim—it was probably a joke. (On the other hand, she characterized as a joke her comment in the pre-VP-selection days that someone would have to tell her what the vice president does—then subsequently proved that she really didn’t know in her odd description of job duties to young Brandon Garcia. So maybe we can anticipate a grandchild named Zamboni or John Deere or Ski-Doo at some point.)

But Todd, man! First dude! Get yer grammar on! Your grammar done slud off the trail!

On the other hand . . . What does a vice president do? “Not only are they there to support the president . . . ”

The vice president they? Plural? Is Sarah including Todd as part of the office, the way she included Todd in her Alaskan administration? We saw how well that little singular/plural misconception flied, now didn’t we?

That would be McCain and Palin, of course, who have raised the ire of Sam Maverick’s descendent (no, not James Garner). In the New York Times:

“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants. . . . “It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd.”

I find a couple of interesting connections between mavericks old and new in language terms:

• Terrellita Maverick seems to believe that the purloined word maverick is in itself a maverick; one meaning of maverick, as recorded in 1890, was “A thing obtained dishonestly,” says the Oxford English Dictionary.
• Sam Maverick’s grandson Fontaine Maury Maverick was himself in government, and is credited with creating a word to describe confusing language and bureaucraticspeak: gobbledygook, you betcha.