There’s actually several books about eponyms. Someone has mentioned Espy’s book. There’s also A New Dictionary of Eponyms by Morton Freeman and The Dictionary of Eponyms by Robert Hendrickson (no doubt out of print) and at least one more.
More: van dyke, spoonerism, dahlia, guppy, sequoia, chauvinist, martinet, nicotine.
There’s also lots of fictional eponyms such as scrooge, romeo, Mrs. Grundy, sherlock…
Yeah, I was thinking about these, but most of the eponyms I can think of are either geographical or firearm-related. Some of the latter: Minie ball, Parkerized, Der®inger, etc. Frankly, I don’t know how to tell if something is truly an eponym, or just the name of a product that the inventor named after himself.
Here are some that are not so firearms related: I think I’ve heard to traitors referred to as Benedict Arnolds (as well as Quislings, as has been mentioned). Hypnosis can be called Mesmerism. Early photographs were called Daguerrotypes.
(Please forgive any mistakes in capitalization. I have no idea which of these terms are vernacular enough to not require capitalization.)
What I really like are the inflected words, derived from somebody’s name, which are strict adjectives. Jacksonian democracy, Frankensteinian medicine, Jeffersonian ideals, Kafkaesque dung beetles, Brechtian theater, Freudian whatever you please, Marxism, Keynesianism, Stalinism. Left-wing movements are named after people (the Socialist Labor Party used to call itself a Marxist-DeLeonist movement); right-wing movements are named after stuff from classical antiquity. (A slight overgeneralization, perhaps.)
Really? What’s a “Mrs. Grundy” in everyday speech?
I remember the character from Speed the Plough, or at least the references to “what Mrs. Grundy would say,” but I’d be as likely to hear a citation of Solomon Grundy in the course of a day’s dialogue.
Anyone remember the episode of the Simpsons where Homer is listed in the dictionary? In that episode, a “Homer” is a clumsy or stupid action that results in an unexpected windfall.
Who’d of thought 2000 years ago that the term “caesarian” would come to refer to a surgical procedure? Any chance that sometime in the future, “hitlerian” will refer to vegetarians and non-smokers?
I was trying to decide whether I would boycott this thread or burke the person who opened it until I saw this question:
Quoting from Miss Manners’ Guide for the Turn-of-the-Millennium,
So probably one would not hear of Mrs. Grundy very frequently in everyday usage, which is no reason to abandon the poor dear or denigrate her for losing her place; to such an action, what would Miss Manners say?
For fictional characters, I am not sure if this term is in wide use, but I have heard several people over the years refer to “babbling on about something you know nothing about” as “Clavinizing”, after Cliff Clavin.
“Shrapnel,” from its inventor, Royal Artillery Lieut. Henry Shrapnel (1761-1842);
“Sam Browne,” a military belt, invented by a one-armed British General who had difficulty in drawing his sword from the conventional waist-belts after losing his left arm winning a Victoria Cross during the India Mutiny of 1857 (The original belt is now on display in the India Room at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst);
“Fuscia,” for the German botanist who first scientifically described the showy bloom;
“Braille,” after Louis Braille;
“Deisel,” after Rudolf Deisel;
Oh, and “Volt,” “Ohm,” “Kelvin,” and “Curie,” after those smart folks;
Rodd Hill reminded me of some others (forgive me if I’m repeating somebody else):
Fahrenheit
Celsius
Ampere
Watt
Mho (just kidding. Mho is just Ohm spelled backwards, I think.)
Coulomb (spelling?)
Skydivers I knew years ago used the term “Mae West” as a verb to describe the situation when a chute opened with a line over the top of the canopy. From all I’ve heard of Ms. West, I think she’d rather go down as a verb than a noun.
Almost forgot about this one, might give y’all a laugh:
Thanks to George Bush (the former pres, not the candidate) puking on their prime minister, the Japanese finally have a socially-acceptable verb for ‘to vomit’. It’s bushu-suru, literally, ‘to do a Bush’. And they actually use it: on The Daily Show, they once showed a brief clip of a Japanese comedy show that featured a monkey that would mime gagging and vomiting when his handler said, “Bushu-suru!”