11.30.08
Nominal truth in word histories based on names
I continue with my recent name dalliance today, and in doing so, I present an “old” joke. The joke itself is not old (I wrote the damn thing and it appears in my Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
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.”
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