In the last issue we looked at words for food derived from people’s names (eponyms). Often people’s names also entered the language because of things they did, with or without their consent or approval. Here are a few examples.

Boycott
Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832-1897) inadvertently gave us this word, meaning ‘to refuse to use, buy or deal with an organisation or country as an expression of protest against its policies or actions.’

Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was a former British soldier who came to Ireland to work as a land agent for Lord Erne, a local landowner in the Lough Mask area of County Mayo.

In 1880, as part of its campaign to protect tenants from exploitation, the Irish Land League under Michael Davitt withdrew the local labour required to save the harvest on Lord Erne’s estate. Boycott tried to undermine the campaign.

Instead of threatening his life or possession of his estate (which would allow him to call in British troops) the locals followed Parnell’s advice, and refused to sell him food or supplies, to work on his estate, or talk to him and his staff. Even the postman refused to deliver his mail.

This ostracism proved very effective. Fifty Orangemen were brought in to harvest the potatoes and over 1000 soldiers/ RIC, costing £10,000 or more to protect a crop worth £350. After about six months, Boycott gave up the job and left Ireland forever.

Gerrymander
To ‘gerrymander’ is to divide an area into election districts so as to give one political party a majority in many districts while concentrating the voting strength of the other party into as few districts as possible. In short, gerrymandering is designing a district to fit a voting pattern.

The name comes from Gov. Elbridge Gerry from Massachusetts, who signed a bill in 1812 to redraw the district boundaries to favour the Democrats and weaken the Federalists. The shape of the district he formed looked like a salamander. The combination of Gerry and salamander led to gerrymander, which has stayed in use.

Even though Governor Gerry did not sponsor the bill in question and was said to have signed it reluctantly, his name has gone into history as a villain. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that extreme examples of gerrymandering– in the case they looked at, an election district was literally one road wide at one point, as the district meandered around to try to grab voters from another area– are unconstitutional.

Cardigan
The cardigan is familiar as a knitted, buttoned jacket, but few people know that it is named after the seventh Earl of Cardigan, a British Cavalry officer (1797-1868) who led the Charge of the Light Brigade. The story is that either he or his men wore the garment in the Crimean War.

Spoonerism
A ‘spoonerism’ is a transposing of initial letters, such as ‘one swell foop’ instead of ‘one fell swoop’, or ‘let us raise our glasses to the queer old Dean’ instead of ‘dear old Queen’.

Reverend William Archibald Spooner spent all his adult life at New College, Oxford, joining it as a scholar in 1862 and retiring as Warden (head of college) in 1924. There is evidence to suggest that he rarely if ever uttered a Spoonerism, although he did transpose words, referring to a friend of a Dr. Child as “Dr Friend’s child.”

Spoonerisms were more likely the products of undergraduate wordplay, more from affection than malice, since Spooner (known as the Spoo) was kindly and well-liked. It’s a cruel twist of fate that he is now only remembered for something he probably didn’t do.

Bowdlerising
To ‘bowdlerise’ a text is to remove those parts considered offensive or vulgar. It comes from Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 published a censored version of Shakespeare, expurgating “… those words and expressions which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” Ever since, the censorship of literary masterpieces through editing has borne his name.

Guillotine
The guillotine, the famous French machine used for beheading, was named after Joseph Guillotin (1738-1814). He was a French physician who, as deputy to the National Assembly (1789) proposed, for humanitarian and efficiency reasons, that capital punishment be carried out by beheading quickly and cleanly on a machine.

Ironically, Guillotin was opposed to the death penalty and hoped that a more humane and less painful method of execution would be the first step toward its total abolition. The association with the guillotine so embarrassed Dr. Guillotin’s family that they petitioned the French government to rename it; when the government refused, they instead changed their own family name.

Lynch
Lynch is short for lynch law, the punishment of a person for some supposed crime without bothering with the niceties of a legal trial.

In Ireland, some people believe that the word ‘lynch’ comes from an event in 1493, when James Lynch FitzStephen, the mayor of Galway, strung up his own son from an upstairs window of his house for murdering a young Spanish house guest.

The window allegedly still exists and has a plaque that commemorates the event. Whether or not the incident actually took place is a matter of debate, but the Oxford Dictionary maintains that this is not the origin of the word.

All the evidence points to its being an American expression. The most likely origin is from a Captain William Lynch (1742-1820) of Pittsylvania, Virginia. In 1780, Lynch led a group of vigilantes combating crime in the Pittsylvania region. Lynch’s preferred punishment was flogging, and the early uses of the term ‘lynch law’ did not imply hanging or capital punishment. Colonel Charles Lynch, the justice who tried offenders, first referred to the process as Lynch’s Law in a letter to William Hay dated 11 May 1782.

It was only later, principally after the Civil War, that the term invariably came to mean hanging as the result of mob action, principally of blacks by whites.

Masochism and Sadism
‘Masochism’ is defined as deriving pleasure from being humiliated or from having pain inflicted upon oneself. The word masochism is believed to come from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-95), an Austrian writer who was infamous for portraying a beautiful woman dressed in furs with a whip as a symbol of strength in his book, ‘Venus in Furs’.

‘Sadism’ is deriving pleasure by inflicting pain on or humiliating another. The word ‘sadism’ is believed to be named after the 19th century Frenchman, Marquis de Sade, whose books ‘Justine’ and ‘120 days of Sodom’ caused public outcry for their depiction of torture and pain.

Teddy Bear
Ending on a gentler note, the soft stuffed toy bear known as a teddy was named after American President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt. Morris Michtom, the owner of a candy store in Brooklyn N.Y., made the first ‘Teddy Bear’ in the year 1902 in his honour when she heard he’d refused to shoot a bear cub on one of his hunting trips.