What's in a 'nym?
EVEN BEFORE MY FORAY into eponymy in last week's column, reader Robert Hlady of Marion had had enough of the eponymous fad. "Hardly a reporter, sportswriter, or arts critic . . . can keep his hands off" the word, Hlady e-mailed earlier this month.
And besides, he said, eponymous is being mishandled. According to Hlady's 1969 dictionary, an eponym -- from the Greek eponumos, "named on" -- is the person whose name is adopted for later use: William Pitt is the eponym of Pittsburgh, Queen Victoria of her era, Horace Fletcher of Fletcherize, the 1906 verb for the thorough chewing he prescribed. So while Pittsburgh, Victorian, and Fletcherize are "eponymous" -- derived from eponyms -- they are not themselves eponyms.
A more expansive definition, however, is coming soon to a dictionary near you. Hlady's source, the American Heritage, still holds the line in its 2000 edition: Chauvin is the eponym, not chauvinism. (The exception is medical usage, which has long referred to the Heimlich maneuver and Alzheimer's disease as eponyms.) But several recent Oxford dictionaries, as well as the Encarta (2001), allow eponym for both the original and its offspring.
These dictionaries are accurately recording usage, and not just among the great unwashed: In the past decade or so, word mavens have regularly used eponym for both the original word and the derivative. The Stanford linguist Geoff Nunberg, in a recent New York Times essay, described Orwellian and Hemingwayesque as eponyms. William Safire is on the same page: "When a person's name turns into a word, that's called an eponym," he declared two years ago in the Times.
The Atlantic Monthly's Cullen Murphy was there already: In a 1997 article for Slate.com, on the surge in eponyms, he cited Teflon presidency, Twinkie defense, and kevork (to assist in a suicide). Evan Morris, master of the website www.word-detective.com, offers dunce and cardigan as eponyms. And though most usage books ignore the question, the 1996 revision of Fowler's Modern English Usage accepts the two-way sense: Macintosh the man and mackintosh the raincoat are both eponyms.
The shift seems natural, since the derivative words are far more useful than their creators. We want to talk about shrapnel, not Henry Shrapnel; about sleeves, not Lord Raglan. So we've assigned a larger role to eponym.
Admittedly, in calling McJob an eponymous offshoot of McDonald's last week, I was stretching eponym even further: To be a genuine eponym, the slang McJob -- a low-skilled gig -- would have to be derived from the company's McJobs training program. Only the Mc prefix is truly eponymous here, but it's one potent prefix, suggesting power, silliness, or dependability as the situation requires: McBullies for school officials who forced kids to attend a McDonald's event, McLibel for the company's lawsuit against English protesters, McKids for its new line of toys and clothes.
It's rare for a mere fragment of a name to have such clout, though -gate, from the Watergate break-in, rivals Mc in its generative power: It's been mixing it up for 30 years, giving us Irangate, Nannygate, Enrongate, and a host of others. Countries and regions do it more easily, dividing to form half-eponymous words like Eurovision, Afropop, AmeriCorps. If we don't want to admit such word parts to the class of eponyms, they need a term of their own, and the choice, I think, is obvious: We'll call them McNyms.
TERMS OF ENDEARMENT: If same-sex marriage spreads, which of the many wedding words will etymologically sensitive couples want to use? The Latin-derived matrimony has decidedly feminine underpinnings: Matrimonium marks a bride's transition to the status of matrona, and that word in turn comes from mater, "mother."
The roots of marriage, at first glance, look more masculine; the word comes from maritus, "married man." But wait -- that maritus may be a participle meaning "provided with a young woman."
For gender neutrality, wedlock is the clear winner. A wed in Old English was simply a pledge, and lock, though it's probably been inspiring bad jokes for a millennium, has nothing to do with a ball and chain: It's a suffix meaning "action, proceeding." So wedlock was simply taking the pledge (and the plunge).
Civil union, of course, is modern and nonsexist, but some advocates of gay marriage say it implies second-class spousehood. It's also hard to use as a verb, though "civil unionize" -- "CU" for short -- has been heard in Vermont. Still, in a world well supplied with uncivil couples, the gently punning "civil union" sounds like progress to me.
E-mail freeman@globe.com.
