I heard a great little song on NPR this morning about people whose names became nouns (eponyms). I’m sure 95% of us here listen to NPR everyday, but on the off chance you haven’t heard it yet, here you are!
For the sake of discussion, if a word was going to be named after you, what would you want (or hope) it to mean?
I actually had this discussion with a friend once, when he was making fun of the fact that I can take great pleasure in doing the same thing over and over without getting bored or annoyed (listening to the same song, watching the same episode, etc). So my last name would mean “someone who enjoys doing repetitious things” or something like that.
In my early days in the IT field, to “pull a [Bayard]” in my office meant to log into a workstation with adminsitrator credentials, then walk away without logging off. Honest, I only did it like twice. Maybe three times.
I would hope that a **bup **would fill that word we need for the father in a blended family, who loves all his children equally. It would be more intimate than ‘stepdad’ or ‘stepfather,’ and could be a word all the children, biological and otherwise, could use for him.
My gaming group always refers to [Foolscap] plans. These are plans which:
[ul][li]Are overly complicated[/li][li]Require a lot of luck[/li][li]Avoid one problem we’re facing while bringing up a host of other ones[/ul][/li]
Some would claim that failure is an integral part as well, but I maintain they always succeed, just not necessarily in the way we expected.
I’d like Billfish to mean something was done R I G H T. But perhaps not with Monk level OCDness.
However, I suspect it will come to mean things were fucked up a hundred ways to Sunday and the reprecusions of that mongolian cluster fuck echo down through the ages.
I could invent a fat-free chocolate that cures cancer and stops global warming and Marley would still be a synonym for marijuana. I’m fine with that. It’s better than, for example, having your name by synonymous with banning the internet from a message board.
Among my friends I am already a noun. It is used as a synonym for geek or nerd. You sentences like:
I don’t know how I would get along without a Joel.
Everybody needs a Joel.
At first it was just computer questions, then any sort of question of technical question, then any sort of question at all.
Joel, how do I get to San Jose?
Joel, what temperature is it outside?
Joel, what’s my mother’s phone number?
Joel, where do I buy a walker?
Joel, what’s the blue book on my car?
Joel, how do I get an arrest expunged?
Joel, does it snow on Mars?
I have friends that have moved to Hawaii and Japan and I’m still their Joel.
A friend of mine, now dead, once told me his son “took a Brody.” He explained it meant a bad fall. He then told me Brody was the first guy to jump off the (some famous bridge.) I never heard it again, and I couldn’t find any reference to it.
In the other direction, Buster Keaton got his first name from taking comic falls in his parents’ stage act, as a boy.
If you’re a college student, you might hope to be a Rhodes scholar, get a Pell grant, a Letterman scholarship, or a Fulbright.