Showing posts with label word nerd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label word nerd. Show all posts

Presidential Eponyms and Why John Adams Doesn't Get Any


Sorry, John.
I'm a bit of a word nerd. There was a time when I lusted after nothing more than the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. A record of every single word in the English language (including obsolete ones) and their etymologies... I had to own it. I stalked that set like a lion in the savanna until its price dipped just below exorbitant and I struck.

On the glorious day those five heavy boxes arrived from Amazon, I'm not ashamed to say I did the same thing I would have done when I was ten years old. I immediately looked up the worst words I could think of to see what new treasures I could find.

I was rewarded handsomely:

I’ve never felt more like Robert Langdon as I raced for Volume 20 (Wave - Zyxt) to unlock the secrets of the mysterious windfucker.
Being the word nerd I am and fascinated with the way words enter our language, there is a special place in my heart for eponymous adjectives – adjectives named after people. Sometimes a person or character comes along who makes such a dent in our culture that their name takes on a meaning all its own. That’s the case for each of the first four presidents except John Adams. You can describe a noun as being Washingtonian, Jeffersonian, and even the rarely-used Madisonian. Heck, even the first Secretary of the Treasury got in on the fun with Hamiltonian.

If we go beyond adjectives into the wild world of nouns, we find other founding fathers have been eponymized as well. “John Hancock” became synonymous with a signature partly because of his oversized name on the Declaration of Independence and partly because creepy salespeople love saying, "Put your John Hancock right here!" Ben Franklin not only got the eponymous Franklin Stove, but Puff Daddy helped make his first name stand for $100 bills with “It’s All About the Benjamins.”

Elbridge Gerry, another signer of the Declaration of Independence and vice-president under James Madison, got himself a verb. Gerrymander means to divide electoral districts in a way that give the party in power an unfair advantage, and wondering how it's legal can make your head explode. Thanks, Gerry.

John Adams doesn’t get an adjective, a noun, a verb, or a stove. His first name doesn't mean money – it's only synonymous with bathrooms and wenchers. Say, for example, the late John F. Kennedy, Jr. had tried to solicit a prostitute in a restroom – you could refer to him as John-John the john john. If John-John paid by check instead of the more customary Benjamins, he would need to bust out his John Hancock.

So why no eponymous love for Adams? To get an eponymous adjective often requires a distinctive style, as in Hitchcockian, Lynchian, and Kafkaesque. John Adams was a brilliant, grandiose, and possibly essential champion of American independence, but he wasn't unique enough for the English language to need a shorter way of saying "That's so Adams!"

Even if he had a truly one-of-a-kind voice, it might not have helped. People tried to use the term “Adamsian” to capture the essence of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The term might have caught on if it sounded better, which is the real problem. We like our eponymous adjectives to roll off the tongue, like Victorian, Christian, Machiavellian. Ah, Machiavellian...how could something so conniving and manipulative sound so beautiful?

“Adamsian” doesn’t roll off the tongue; it falls back in the throat and makes you gag. You need ice cream after saying it like you just had your tonsils removed.

Early versions of Microsoft’s Clippy were even more aggressive.
But just because John Adams's name doesn’t lend itself to a melodic tongue party of an adjective like Niccolò Machiavelli doesn’t mean he can’t have an adjective all his own. So let's give him one.

Forget those boring common suffixes –ian and –esque. Those are for regular incredible people. I propose giving Adams the less popular –ic suffix:
Adamsic: [uh-dams-ik]
adjective
1. Of or pertaining to President John Adams, his presidency, or his personality.
2. Characteristic of the man Benjamin Franklin described as “always an honest man, often a brilliant one, but sometimes absolutely mad.”

The defense attorney used her Adamsic speaking skills to keep the jury engaged during her lengthy closing arguments. 
If history considers Adams a mediocre president, it seems fitting for his eponym to share a suffix with other disappointing terms, like "Platonic" love and the "Bubonic" plague.

One surprising presidential eponym that is certainly not disappointing is the teddy bear. The children's toy was named for an incident on a hunting trip where Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot a black bear tied to a tree. The other kind of teddy, the sexy lingerie item, was named because its puffy form reminded someone of the stuffed bear. A form-fitting teddy doesn't seem "puffy" by today's standards, but this was the 1930s where wire corsets were still a thing. If women back then weren't being brutally choked into an hourglass shape, they apparently looked like floppy little fur-beasts. Who knew?

I made a longer list of the most popular presidential eponyms I could find in the chart below. Some are in the Oxford English Dictionary, more recent ones are on dictionary.com or Wikipedia, and a few of the older ones are so legit they pass the red squiggly line spell check test in Word – that’s how you know you’ve made it.
http://i.imgur.com/p9rFXC3.png

Let me know if you can think of more or have suggestions for new ones, and maybe I’ll let you into The SSW (Secret Society of Windfuckers.)


Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, dictionary.com, Wikipedia, word-detective.com

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George Washington Did WHAT to Prostitutes?!


George Washington wenched.
As a young general during the French and Indian War, George Washington very likely paid for sex. According to biographer James Thomas Flexner:
“Although he drank and gambled and (we gather) wenched as did his officers, he was known as a stern disciplinarian in military matters.”
First, thank you, James Thomas Flexner, for slipping in that salacious supposition in a subordinate clause like it’s the most matter-of-fact thing in the world that the father of our country had hookers. But what the hell does "we gather" mean? Who is “we” and how did we gather that?

Maybe this is what I get for reading Flexner's one-volume consolidation instead of his four-volume epic Washington biography. Maybe I'm missing out on supporting details, like a diary entry from Washington saying “Warring with these French and Indians makes me weary. Nothing, save wenching, improves my demeanor.” Maybe one of the four volumes is entirely devoted to Washington's wenching. I'll never know.

What struck me most here was not that Washington wenched. Why wouldn’t he? He was 26 years old, single, and his deism didn’t include strict religious scruples against it. Nothing about his wenching changes the strong leader and husband he went on to be.

No, what struck me most was Flexner's use of the word “wenched.” Where has this term been all my life? Such a perfect word that turns a noun into a verb with no need for a direct object. Few words so succinctly answer the questions “what did he do and with whom?” Usually when nouns are verbified they take on the action of doing what their noun does, e.g, “The whore whored.” But the wench didn't wench -- the wencher wenched!
I don’t want to sound sexist here – I believe anyone can be a wench if they put their mind to it. And anyone paying for those services has the right to be referred to as concisely as possible.

So I propose we bring back the verb “wench” in all its forms to honor the late James Thomas Flexner. And George Washington. And America. I’m not asking you to wench yourself or do anything that makes you uncomfortable; I’m simply proposing that when circumstances call for it, you refer to wenchers and wenching by the best words possible. I get that this might not come up in conversation very often, so I’m taking my case to someone who can bring this word to the masses.

Who, you ask, could throw out this word in an appropriate situation and get it to catch fire?
ICE-T!
That’s right. Rapper and actor Ice-T, star of Law & Order: SVU.

Based on my gut, approximately 25% of SVU episodes contain references to soliciting prostitutes. All I’m asking you to do, Ice-T (or writers of Ice-T’s dialogue), is to slip in a wenching. One time. See how it feels.

Here’s an example:
ICE-T: We caught him wenching in Queens.
It sounds like a real term used by a real elite squad!

Here’s another:
OLIVIA BENSON: The perp was brought in for solicitation last April. 
ICE-T: Yeah, he wenched all right. It was especially heinous.
Other cast members can participate too!
ELLIOTT STABLER: I’ve come back for you, Liv. I’ve always loved you.
OLIVIA BENSON : Oh, El. Let me book this perp for wenching and then let’s get some coffee together forever. 
It sounds so natural!
Please, if you or someone you know works on Law & Order: SVU, or if you happen to be Ice-T, help me out with this wenching thing. For James, for George, for johns, and for (we gather) America.


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