~a column by Colleen O’Brien
There are famous and infamous people who leave their mark on language. These people can be inventors, aristocrats, courtesans, crooks. Unlike a Charlemagne or a Joan of Arc, there are many once well-known individuals and their deeds that add richness to our language even as they themselves faded into obscurity; their names live on without any connection to the individual.
When the names of these people are incorporated into the vernacular, the capitalization of the name is dropped to lower case and we have a new word. John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, is a good example. Montagu, a member of British Parliament and a compulsive gambler, during a particularly crucial game of chance, could not take time out to eat. Having gambled for an entire night, the earl was ravenous. He ordered bread and meat brought to his gaming table, and still too involved in the game to push his chair back and eat, the Earl of Sandwich slapped the meat on the bread, and Voila! The sandwich was born.
Today, particularly in this country, sandwich is a well-known and often-used word. The sandwich comes in a thousand varieties, and even 3-year-olds are familiar with the word. The Earl of Sandwich left his mark but hardly anyone knows it was he who left it. His name is dropped more often than the name of any great man or woman you can think of, and, yet, the poor earl has faded into obscurity, leaving to posterity only his title as the mainstay of the American lunch.
Perhaps some gambler at our Wild Rose Casino will do something odd or extraordinary and his name will live on in fame or infamy.
A woman named Jeanne Antoinette Poisson left behind her official title, Marquise de Pompadour. The mistress of Louis XV, la Pompadour set the styles for the French court, including the swept-up hair-do that soon bore her name. The pompadour is not in vogue today, but it will return — it’s come and gone several times since Antoinette first tried it. We will know the pompadour when we see it, but the beautiful Marquise who made it famous and whose name describes it is now relegated to one or two sentences in the history books.
Many inventors became well-known through a discovery or invention. Often the product or idea is given the name of its discoverer, and in time, the invention itself is what is important; the scientist is forgotten. Most of us know a watt is a unit of electrical power. We never think about James Watt, in whose honor the discovery was named.
There was a general named Henry Shrapnel. He invented the exploding artillery shell which we call shrapnel. There was a doctor named Louis Pasteur. Because of him, we drink pasteurized milk and beer whose disease-producing bacteria doesn’t thrive for long. There was a physicist named Georg S Ohm who discovered the unit of electrical resistance which we call ohm. There was a scientist named Allesandro Volta from whom we get the word volt, the unit of electromotive force.
Many articles of clothing that we wear today were designed by people whose names are now incorporated into the language in lower case letters. The leotard, the macintosh, the cardigan, the bloomer came from the French aerial performer Leotard, the Scotsman Charles Macintosh, the English seventh Earl of Cardigan, the American feminist reformer Amelia Bloomer.
There are behavioral words in daily use that were once the names of strange-acting personalities: Sadism comes from the Count de Sade, a Frenchman who was imprisoned several times because of his writings describing the pleasures derived from mistreating one’s partner. Masochism comes from the writings of the Austrian von Sacher-Masoch, whose stories dealt with the pleasures derived from being mistreated by one’s partner. Chauvinism comes from a French soldier, Nicolas Chauvin, who went overboard in his patriotism and devotion to France and Napoleon.
We eat pralines, not realizing they are named after Marshal Duplessis-Praslin, whose cook invented the crisp pecan candy (so much for the cook getting the credit). We munch on graham crackers, a wheat kernel meat substitute advocated by a vegetarian of the eighteenth century named Sylvester Graham.
We serve a gibson cocktail, gin with a pearl onion, named after an America diplomat, Hugh Gibson. Mr. Gibson discovered he could not attend embassy functions and maintain his clear head while drinking martinis (gin with a green olive), so he instructed his waiters to serve him water, which looks like gin, with an onion in the glass to indicate which one he should take. This enabled Gibson to keep his cool while not appearing to be a party-pooper. Other dignitaries were amazed at Gibson’s ability to drink glass after glass of gin without becoming inebriated. They took to ordering “gibsons,” thinking the pearl onion had magical qualities that prevented the potent gin from incapacitating them.
We may not be star material, we may never have our name on the title page nor be written up in the history books, but there is the possibility we will hit the etymology books. Because of a rock-stacking habit of mine, I figure I can’t miss: When I taught my grandchildren how to stack rocks and that the result was called a “cairn,” they started calling them “colleens.” I’m all for that.
You may use the word when you yourself start stacking rocks.
