Читать книгу Harvey Wallbangers and Tam O'Shanters - Martin Hannan - Страница 6

Admit it – you have no real idea who Tam O’Shanter or Harvey Wallbanger were. But you’re interested enough to have got this far – so read on and prepare to be entertained and enlightened in equal measure.

The fact that we mark people’s achievements is a very human activity. Other species have kings and queens, pack leaders and stand-out individuals, but they are not commemorated in stone, ink or through oral history. Only the human race idolises its own.

There are statues and paintings of famous and not-so-famous people all over the world. Politicians and pop stars sometimes have airports named after them, while local worthies across the globe will be granted the honour of being forever remembered by having a street named after them. Sports stars will perhaps lend their name to a stadium, while royalty will be commemorated on the sides of ships or in the titles of charities.

Yet, for a comparatively few people, there is an honour, deserved or otherwise, which is much more lasting and can often become part of day-to-day language. Put simply, their name becomes all or part of an eponym. When it happens, for good or ill, that person gains a form of immortality, for their entry into common usage will be recorded in dictionaries and lexicons.

Eponyms are words which gain their meaning from a name, usually that of a person. They occur in most languages, but English is very good at nurturing them. Due mainly to its supremacy in science, business and worldwide culture, the English language is global, vibrant and living. It is constantly being reinvented and developed by absorption from myriad sources across the planet.

Since ‘modern’ English was first structured in the Middle Ages, words from different languages have been imported and adapted over the centuries, and have vastly enriched English. Human invention has also changed the language – neologisms (newly coined words or phrases) happen all the time in a fast-moving, developing world, although some die out very quickly.

Eponyms, however, stand apart. They are a word form which relies on a name, whether that name comes from a real person such as an inventor or discoverer, or from a fictional, legendary or mythical character. They are widespread and, consequently, one of the commonest phrases in modern usage is ‘the eponymous …’ We usually know what ‘the eponymous’ means – that an item, or a quality, described either by a phrase or single word, has been given the name of some person, real or fictitious.

It seems simple – Churchillian means ‘like Winston Churchill’, while the Ali Shuffle or Fosbury Flop, for instance, get their names from the great sportsmen who invented these manoeuvres. A Harvey Wallbanger may – or may not – have been named after a surfer called Harvey who downed several of the cocktails and started bashing into the walls of a bar in Los Angeles; more of that later. A Tam O’Shanter also gets its name from a chap who had drunk too much, a character created by Scotland’s greatest poet, Robert Burns.

Simple, yes, but the eponym is one of the most fascinating and complex instances of how language, and especially the English language, gains new words. The extraordinary evolution of English over the centuries has been the subject of many books and, in every book, the story of English is never less than complex. This book will be no different – to understand eponyms, very often you have to know or learn about subjects ranging from medieval Christianity to 20th-century cooking. That’s because eponyms have a history all of their own, although few people champion them because they are so much part of our everyday usage of the language. Which is a pity, because there are marvellous stories lurking behind virtually every single one of them.

The aim of this book is to gather as many of those stories as possible. As well as examining the phenomenon that is the eponym, this book will show how they developed in English usage and changed the language in doing so. What’s more, we’ll have some fun along the way, because language is never less than dynamic and often endlessly surprising.

Eponyms have staying power; precious few people know anything about Niccolo Machiavelli of Florence who died in 1527 but, nearly five centuries later, we all understand ‘machiavellian’ to describe a cynical and opportunistic philosophy. It is used ever more frequently in these mendacious days, but the word was already in use before the man himself died.

New eponyms crop up constantly but, like so many neologisms, they should be given no real credence unless they are still in use, say a decade later. That is why, in Harvey Wallbangers and Tam O’Shanters, in all but a few exceptional circumstances, the ‘cut-off’ date for coining will be 2001 as any eponyms minted after that date are still too young.

I will not differentiate, as some grammarians do, between so called ‘true’ and ‘pseudo’ eponyms. The former is usually seen as a word in which the original ‘name’ has been replaced by an understanding that has a life of its own – ‘boycott’ or ‘hooliganism’, for example.

‘Pseudo-eponyms’ are usually taken to be names applied to objects or ideas, such as Reaganomics or Thatcherism, or to scientific and medical terms such as Parkinson’s Disease. These eponyms are just as deserving of consideration as the ‘true’ eponym, and the main difference appears to be whether lexicologists give an eponym an initial letter that is upper or lower case – a form of snobbery, a word which itself is arguably an eponym drawn from WM Thackeray’s Book of Snobs. Nevertheless, almost all company names, advertising and branding eponyms – e.g. the Winalot dog, the Emirates Stadium – will be omitted, if only on grounds of good taste.

Some forms of eponym can also derive from the names of places or things, but this book concentrates on eponyms that gain their definition from people, be they real or fictional – after all, a fictional character can make for a very interesting story. That’s why I have also included a small section on ‘place-name’ eponyms, principally because of the stories behind them.

Not every known eponym will be included. There are just too many, especially in the scientific field. The Book of Medical Eponyms, for instance, would have thousands of entries alone.

My collection will feature only the better known of the scientific eponyms, but the list will still be long and wide-ranging, with the main criterion – though not rigidly so – being that the eponym is already in a dictionary or encyclopaedia, dozens of which I have consulted.

In some cases, I will also show that the common presumption that a word is an eponym is simply at odds with the facts.

This book will no doubt be accused of being idiosyncratic and quirky – well, so was Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. For instance, just like the good doctor, my definitions will be as long or as short as I want to make them, depending on the quality of the story behind the word.

I will also include my own eponym: Hannan’s Law – the assertion that a statement has less credibility the more exaggeratedly someone states it. For instance, if someone says something is ‘definite fact’, you must automatically presume the ‘fact’ needs double-checking. Or if a politician says ‘it is true to say …’ then you can bet your wages on the rest of the sentence being a lie. Murphy’s Law – there will be a section on these eponymous laws – unfortunately suggests that somebody else will have already coined an eponym for my Hannanist creed, but my name will go on it … and, according to Stigler’s Law, someone else will supplant my name.

Harvey Wallbanger and Tam O’Shanters – A Book of Eponyms hopes to be a work that can be read for pleasure and yet will stand as a reference book for writers and all who want to enrich their language and knowledge.

It is because this book is aimed at writers and people who love using the English language that I have decided to group eponyms under headings which indicate how the word can be used, inspired by the eponymous thesaurus of Monsieur Roget. There is a full alphabetical listing at the back of the book, however.

Above all, I want to tell stories about words, and hopefully with sufficient humour to retain your interest. I view this as a work in progress and, with a website starting the week the book is published – www.martinhannan.com – I hope readers will take the chance to correct any mistakes I have made or add more eponyms and explanations.

Consequently, Harvey Wallbangers and Tam O’Shanters – A Book of Eponyms will not be stentorian in tone, but will be as light as a zephyr. It will not plough the Stygian depths of the language for every example of an eponym, and the tone will be more Dickensian than Dylanesque or Joycean. Nevertheless, the author’s approach to this herculean task will be Stakhanovite with a touch of Taylorist efficiency thrown in.

See what I mean about eponyms? They’re everywhere.