Who wants to be a noun?

Factual Questions
41

After posting, I realized there was an easy way of seeing what was the most common spelling. AltaVista had just under 50,000 hits for fuchsia and just under 10,000 hits for fuschia. So call it a 5:1 ratio for the correct spelling. On other search engines, the ratio was worse, less than 4:1 on both Yahoo and NorthernLight. That’s a very high misspelling rate.

Dan Tilque

42

“Hey, Beavis” seems to be an oft-hurled insult among some, um, people’s kids I know.

Wasn’t it one Mr. Crapper who invented the toilet?

I’m finished having kids. The next diaper I want in my life is to be my own!

43

Monet - non. Seurat - oui.

All I wanna do is to thank you, even though I don’t know who you are…

44

Wow! Once again, I am stunned by the knowledge of the Teeming Millions (especially aseymayo’s two show-biz related contributions!).

45

Ursa Major said:

Well, actually, the name of the procedure has nothing to do with fair Dictator-For-Life Julius Caesar. ‘Caesarian’ is actually descended from the Latin ‘caedare’, meaning ‘to cut’. Any similiarity between that and Julius’ last name is just coincidence- Caesar was unlikely ‘from his mother’s womb untimely ripped’, mostly evidenced by how long his mother survived after his birth (most ancient C-sections didn’t go all that well for the mother).

As long as we’re going with fictional characters, how about a “Dagwood” (any sandwich piled so high as to be nearly uneatable)?

JMCJ

Give to Radiskull!

46

Argh, my typo! :o :o I know damn well that it starts out the same way as the person’s name - that’s why I gave the name. :o :o What’s that law that says a post to point out a spelling error will contain a spelling error?

Around 1979, when Dick Cavett was on PBS, Walter Matthau was a guest. He worked with Glenda Jackson on the 1978 movie House Calls. Apparently they’re both good spellers, and Jackson challenged him to spell the word in question. On Cavett’s show as aired, Matthau recounted his response, saying, “So I started, F-U-C-K…” Cavett managed to keep a straight faces.

…this is another Moebius sig…b!s sn!qaoW jay+oue s! s!y+…
(adaptation of a WallyM7Sig™ a la quadell)

For business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity. - Mark Twain

47

Henry
Tesla
Coulomb
Angstrom

My favourite is a British one,the Archer,which refers to £2000 ,the amount Geoffrey Archer tried to pay off a prostitute with.
eg How much is that car? An Archer to you sir.

48

I had a history teacher once tell our class about a Russian official during the cold war named Malatov and he said that was where the term Malatov cocktail came from.

“I have a lot of good ideas, problem is most of them suck.” -George Carlin

49

How about McCarthyism?

Sassy said:

I heard this just last night while watching Clueless on HBO. Alicia Silverstone’s character says that a particular girl is “a Monet, because she looks OK from far away, but up close, she’s a big ol’ mess.”

50

Yes, the Molotov cocktail is named after the Soviet foreign minister of the era. The thing is, I’ve heard two completely different etymologies of it.

The anti-Molotov explanation is that the while the Soviets were bombing hell out of the Finns, Molotov claimed publicly that they were just dropping bread to Finland’s starving masses. The Finns called the bombing “Molotov’s breadbaskets” as a sort of stoic joke. So when they needed a quick anti-tank weapon, made out of a liquor bottle, they extended the gastronomic metaphor and called them Molotov cocktails.

The pro-Molotov explanation has to do with the Spanish civil war, in which the Soviets sided with the Republic. I don’t know the specifics of this story, but I think it was basically that while the Soviets provided the Loyalists with lots of weapons, the Loyalists still had to make do with homemade gasoline bombs, which they named in honor of the fella who kept supplies coming to the Madrid government.

A third explanation, that Molotov liked to drink gasoline, has been submitted by no one.

51

Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet, per se, but developed the valve for flushing that is still in use today.

From the Hendrickson book mentioned above:
Pyrrhic victory–after King “one more such victory and we are lost” Pyrrhus.
Salmonella–named after a Dr Salmon.
Raglan–after Lord Raglan whose arm was amputated on the battlefield and later designed his overcoat sleeves accordingly.
Get this: the monkey wrench (spanner), named after a guy name Moncke.
And let’s not forget: Onanism

Your brain-in-a-jar,
Myron

Imbibo, ergo sum.

52

If you want your name to become

history, try betrayal.

We all know about “Benedict Arnold”

and check out a guy named “Quisling”

from Finland in the 1940’s

53

So, althought he didn’t invent the toilet, Crapper invented the flapper?

How consonant…

54

The farad was named after Michael Faraday, the British chemist. Also, nobody has yet mentioned Alessandro Volta.

55

I dunno how true this is because I read it as the fun fact in a Far Side calender, but Silhoutte was the same of a French contoller general (or other high-ranking postition), but only lasted a few months, and his name became a synonym for “shadow.”

“I need the biggest seed bell you have. . . no, that’s too big.”–Hans Moleman

56

Would ‘McCarthyism’ qualify as an eponym? The ‘ism’ at the end indicates to me that the term is an adjective, meaning “Acting like McCarthy”, which seems to fall short of what an eponym should be. Otherwise, we could include such things as ‘Reagan Democrats’.

Am I right, or (as usual) off in my own plane of existence?

JMCJ

Give to Radiskull!

57

Since I don’t have a real eponym to contribute, I’ll throw in a funny story.

In a high school physics class, one of my fellow students asked about the word ‘dipole.’ The teacher, who knew biology well but had never taken physics in college, described a 19th century German scientist named Gustav Dipole. Those of us who knew where the word came from let him get most of the way through making up his story before we started laughing ourselve sick.

“If you prick me, do I not…leak?” --Lt. Commander Data

58

A web site with a number of eponyms is http://members.aol.com/gulfhigh2/words16.html

It’s not an attempt to be a complete list of all English eponyms, but it does have some interesting ones not mentioned in this thread.

Dan Tilque

59

Yes, do check out Vidkun Quisling. You’ll notice he was Norwegian, not Finnish. Putz.

For once you must try to face the facts: Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

60

[QUOTE]
Originally posted by mazirian:
** Yes, do check out Vidkun Quisling. You’ll notice he was Norwegian, not Finnish. Putz.
oops, sorry, I wanted to post his

first name, but when I looked it up

in “Notable Finlanders”, I couldn’t

find it. Now I know why.