accomplices, “house girls” Isabelle Fyffe and Mary “Gold Tooth” Thornton.
Status: annoying hipster use
milquetoast
Caspar Milquetoast was everything you might expect from the protagonist of a comic strip entitled Timid Soul , created in 1924 by H. T. Webster.
Status: dated
pinchbeck
Counterfeit, false, cheap, worthless, tawdry. Christopher Pinchbeck was a London watchmaker in the early 1700s who marketed jewelry made out of imitation gold, the alloy of which (lots of copper and a bit of zinc) he developed himself.
Status: used in intellectually elitist periodicals
AFTERWORD
When I was little, my mother told me that the word pumpernickel came from the name of Napoleon’s horse, Nickel. While encamped in Germany, Napoleon’s soldiers complained about the indigestible local black bread. Napoleon responded that his horse liked the stuff well enough. “If it’s bon pour Nickel ,” the little Corsican said, “then it’s good for you too.”
Sadly, the tale is utterly apocryphal. The origin for the name likely comes from pumper , a German word meaning “fart.” It is one of many enticing word stories I would have loved to include in the book but couldn’t.
People have postulated that the term jerry-built refers to the handiwork of a Jerry Bros. construction firm that put up exceptionally shoddy housing in late-1800s London, but they offer no proof. Eponym hunters have also searched the world for the first person to be batty and turned up two plausible candidates: one, Jamaican barrister Fitzherbert Batty, declared legally insane in the 1800s; and two, William Battie, eighteenth-century author of A Treatise on Madness . So which is the right one? Neither. The word derives from the phrase “bats in the belfry.”
Historians have cried eponymy to discredit subjects they don’t like. In his work of the 1570s, Perambulation of Kent , William Lambarde wrote that the first harlot was Arlette, mother of William the Conqueror, known to chauvinistic Englishmen as William the Bastard. Lambarde was nursing a grudge over the 1066 Norman invasion but most probably believed the etymology; certainly it has been cited countless times in the four centuries since. However, to look at a passage from Chaucer—“A sturdy harlot went them aye behind, / That was their hoste’s man, and bare a sack, / And what men gave them, laid it on his back”—we see that the word previously meant a different kind of worker.
At least harlot has a reasonable false etymology; other would-be eponyms are plain silly. Condom has been said to derive from either a Dr. Condom, personal physician to King Charles II of England, or the Earl of Condom. There is no Condom in Britain to be an Earl of, nor is Condom a known English surname, although Condon is, which is how the prophylactic was sometimes spelt in the 1700s. But in the earliest extant reference the spelling is quondam , leading to the suggestion that it is derived from the Italian word guantone , which roughly translates to “a big glove.” In short, the etymology is unknown, but hope remains alive that we will find a lusty but careful Mr. Condon out there.
Great long lists of eponyms can be found all over the Internet, some so loaded with counterfeits that more than half the names are phonies. But even one conscientious site has, among hundreds of accurate entries, the apocryphal figures Nathaniel Bigot (said to have been an English Puritan teacher), a Portuguese man named João Marmalado, and Leopold von Asphalt.
My favorite fraud is the esteemed Dominican scholar Domenico da Comma (1260–1316). This Italian monk inserted his namesake commas into the heretofore woefully under-punctuated Bible to make it more readily comprehensible. For his efforts, da Comma was charged with heresy by the Inquisition, who considered his editorial improvement “an affront to God.” If only it were so; the word instead comes from the Greek komma , cut off.
But things are not always so clear,
Status: annoying hipster use
milquetoast
Caspar Milquetoast was everything you might expect from the protagonist of a comic strip entitled Timid Soul , created in 1924 by H. T. Webster.
Status: dated
pinchbeck
Counterfeit, false, cheap, worthless, tawdry. Christopher Pinchbeck was a London watchmaker in the early 1700s who marketed jewelry made out of imitation gold, the alloy of which (lots of copper and a bit of zinc) he developed himself.
Status: used in intellectually elitist periodicals
AFTERWORD
When I was little, my mother told me that the word pumpernickel came from the name of Napoleon’s horse, Nickel. While encamped in Germany, Napoleon’s soldiers complained about the indigestible local black bread. Napoleon responded that his horse liked the stuff well enough. “If it’s bon pour Nickel ,” the little Corsican said, “then it’s good for you too.”
Sadly, the tale is utterly apocryphal. The origin for the name likely comes from pumper , a German word meaning “fart.” It is one of many enticing word stories I would have loved to include in the book but couldn’t.
People have postulated that the term jerry-built refers to the handiwork of a Jerry Bros. construction firm that put up exceptionally shoddy housing in late-1800s London, but they offer no proof. Eponym hunters have also searched the world for the first person to be batty and turned up two plausible candidates: one, Jamaican barrister Fitzherbert Batty, declared legally insane in the 1800s; and two, William Battie, eighteenth-century author of A Treatise on Madness . So which is the right one? Neither. The word derives from the phrase “bats in the belfry.”
Historians have cried eponymy to discredit subjects they don’t like. In his work of the 1570s, Perambulation of Kent , William Lambarde wrote that the first harlot was Arlette, mother of William the Conqueror, known to chauvinistic Englishmen as William the Bastard. Lambarde was nursing a grudge over the 1066 Norman invasion but most probably believed the etymology; certainly it has been cited countless times in the four centuries since. However, to look at a passage from Chaucer—“A sturdy harlot went them aye behind, / That was their hoste’s man, and bare a sack, / And what men gave them, laid it on his back”—we see that the word previously meant a different kind of worker.
At least harlot has a reasonable false etymology; other would-be eponyms are plain silly. Condom has been said to derive from either a Dr. Condom, personal physician to King Charles II of England, or the Earl of Condom. There is no Condom in Britain to be an Earl of, nor is Condom a known English surname, although Condon is, which is how the prophylactic was sometimes spelt in the 1700s. But in the earliest extant reference the spelling is quondam , leading to the suggestion that it is derived from the Italian word guantone , which roughly translates to “a big glove.” In short, the etymology is unknown, but hope remains alive that we will find a lusty but careful Mr. Condon out there.
Great long lists of eponyms can be found all over the Internet, some so loaded with counterfeits that more than half the names are phonies. But even one conscientious site has, among hundreds of accurate entries, the apocryphal figures Nathaniel Bigot (said to have been an English Puritan teacher), a Portuguese man named João Marmalado, and Leopold von Asphalt.
My favorite fraud is the esteemed Dominican scholar Domenico da Comma (1260–1316). This Italian monk inserted his namesake commas into the heretofore woefully under-punctuated Bible to make it more readily comprehensible. For his efforts, da Comma was charged with heresy by the Inquisition, who considered his editorial improvement “an affront to God.” If only it were so; the word instead comes from the Greek komma , cut off.
But things are not always so clear,
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