10.09.08

Maverick herds the bull

Posted in English origins, assorted weird crap, eponyms, verbal indiscretions at 6:16 pm by Bill Brohaugh

We’ve been hearing a lot of mavericks in this election. The word derives from Samuel Augustus Maverick, a 19th-century rancher and politician who did not mark his cattle with brands (nor, I would assume, did he mark his bulldogs or pigs with lipstick). In time, the name was generalized to denote any unbranded bovine, and then was swiftly given figurative use to denote independent people and less swiftly to self-denote political candidates who couldn’t manage to herd themselves.

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.

Permalink