Does anyone know the term to use when a proper name or noun is used as a verb?
For example: someone was "Bork-ed", we've been "Daschel-ed", "Forest Gump-ed" your way through life.
Any ideas?
"Eponym" is a noun, and nouns can be "verbed".
"Eponym" is a noun
We'll be OK as long as we don't boycott this thread.
Anyone who boycotts this thread will get lynched.
Lynch is even better than boycott since it seems to have never been anything than a verb; boycott seems to have appeared simultaneously as a verb and a noun.
I don't see why the word eponym can't apply here.
Dear wsieber: Hard to find a guillotine. But you can jack ketch a guy with his own suspenders/
OK, I admit to inventing "jack ketch" as a verb. He was a famous English hangman.
http://www.hangman.info/hangman2.htm
>I admit to inventing "jack ketch" as a verb.
'ketch' is an extant verb in this sense (cf. ketchcraft).
Dear tsuwm: your knowledge of obscure words mesmerizes me.
Way,way back, so long ago "Search" can't find it, Wordsmith posted an epnymic verb,
"Fletcherize" meaning alleged health benefit from chewing each mouthful forty times before
swallowing. To prove I'm not fabricating this, here is a quote about it:
"One of the earliest promoters of changing how one eats was a man named Horace Fletcher,
(1849-1919) of Lawrence Mass. He evolved a system called Fletcherism, concerned chiefly
with the slow mastication (chewing) of food. Among his numerous publications are Glutton
or Epicure(1899) and Fletcherism: What It Is (1913). Try looking up Fletcherism or
Fletcherize in any dictionary.
If you follow Fletcherism, you will chew each bite of food until it becomes a watery mass in
your mouth before swallowing. This has two effects. First, if you chew a bite of food that
long, you will be consuming your meal at a slower rate. Secondly, the reduction of this
food to a watery mass means that it will be less difficult to extract nutrients from the food."
Date: Mon Mar 5 02:12:10 EST 2001
Subject: A.Word.A.Day--fletcherize
X-Bonus: People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within. -Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, psychiatrist and author (1926- )
Fletcherize (FLECH-uh-ryz) verb tr., intr.
To chew food thoroughly.
[From the practice of chewing food many many times as advocated by Horace
Fletcher, U.S. nutritionist (1849-1919).]
"Dinner table conversation comes to a halt as people around the nation
Fletcherize."
Morsels from Diet History, Florida Today, Oct 19, 1999.
The idea of Fletcherizing invites the question, "Is too much of a good thing
better?" Horace Fletcher proposed that one should grind food once for each
tooth in the mouth. That implies that we masticate each bite of pizza as
many as 32 times. I'd rather stick with the idea that each byte has eight
bits. At any rate, Mr. Fletcher, the art dealer turned nutritionist, did
earn the moniker `The Great Masticator,' for his popular book at the time
and got his name into the dictionary. This week we'll look at more such
words, eponyms, coined after people from fact and from fiction. -Anu
While forty bites for each morsel is absurd, there are indeed benefits to eating slowly,
and chewing food intil all the lumps are gone. It has been so long since I read any
physiology that I can't remember the details about oral enzymes beginning process,
and gtomach and intestinal enzymes being secreted, and peristalsis being facilitated.
And peace, quiet, and pleasant surroundings, interesting conversation and other
amenities contribute significantly.
Only idiots need to have "the hind lick maneuver" - surely everyone has heard that
story. If not, PM me.