If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. A Mr. Ponzi offered
to double his investors' money in a very short time. Behind his promise of
grandiose returns there was no engine of industry to harness human potential
and generate revenue. It was all a facade, using the money of new investors
to pay off the previous ones. Soon the bubble burst, and with that Ponzi's
name was forever etched in contemporary parlance as an eponym for such
schemes. (Then again, who knows... he may have been ahead of his time and
dealing in Internet stocks :-). At any rate, in this week's AWAD we'll invest
our time in eponyms from fact as well as from fiction.

One of the most irritating eponyms is mentor; not in itself, but in that the person being mentored always gets referred to as a mentee, which is a *horrible* word. A friend of mine suggested that it should really be a telemecus (sp?), which would be another eponym and make the whole thing work better.

Rach.

======================
AOL IM: RachelEDugdale

Encyclopedia gives Mentor as tutor of Odysseus' son Telemachus.

http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=8598&Search=true&Forum=All_Forums&Words=Mentor&Match=Entire Phrase&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Old=1year

Allo

You might want to check out this thread. It goes on about this subject also. I didn't do the bracket thing to make it clickable since the url is toooo long and post would then be larger that our screens (quite annoying). You can copy and paste it in the address slot if you want.

Salut

bel, all of these thread pointers have a "Number" field; you can cut the link off after this field and it WORKS!!

http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=8598

you can cut the link off after this field ...

Patience, tsuwm, patience! We are listening. Really.

And I start to feel a formation coming upon on us - YCCTLATN

There are many,many medical eponyms, but thirty years ago there was a call for diseases to be named from causative agent, pathologic process, etc. For a while some journalists were even referring to Lyme's Disease.Actually it is interesting that recognition of the disease began with a bright group of mothers in Lyme, Connecticut.

Whoa! I have just read the article about Anu in an actual
Smithsonian magazine that an oh-so-kind friend sent to me.
The size of the AWAD distribution makes Gargantuan
a VERY appropriate word!

When I lived in Rhode Island, I was told that the fashion of a partial beard on the cheeks was named "Burnsides" from General Burnside, a civil war general from R.I., who may have initiated the fashion. My understanding is, that after a number of years, when he was no longer famous, people who heard the term "corrected" it to sideburns, which made more sense to them (but not to me), and that seems to be the usage today. I checked the dictionary, which does give each as meaning the same fashion. Can anyone confirm my story? Does anyone remember General B.?

I heard about AWAD through Smithsonian, Jackie. And that sideburns story is true as far as I can reckon.

jimthedog

Hello, Mila. Yes, the etymology of sideburns has been repeated consistently in every source I've ever seen. I believe you can take it as reliable.

According to Why You Say It, Burnside also sported a hat so flamboyant that it took his name as well.

I have a vague recollection that my history teacher also related that General Burnside additionally tried a facial hair style which involved not shaving underneath his jaw line all the way down to his collar, but that particular fashion statement didn't catch on the way sideburns did.

And an old Today's Word "metathesis" describes the process og going from "Burnside" to "sideburn".

AWAD for March 2,2000 gave Dolly Varden as the name of a colorfully dressed character in Dickens novel Barnaby Rudge.
It is also the name of a very popular trout fly.

Even here in Germany I receive Smithsonian and it brought me here! Hooray! It's sometimes hard to be a native English speaker in another country. I can't discuss the questions raised here with my German friends, they wouldn't understand. Visiting AWAD gives me the feeling that my English isn't falling into disrepair!

Visiting AWAD gives me the feeling that my English isn't falling into disrepair!

Ah, the sweet innocence of newcomers. Just wait.... <evil grin>

It's been a while for this thread, though we've dealt with the concept elsewhere.

thersitical: loud and abusive, scurrilous

After Thersites, the gentlemen who is the first commoner in Western literature to challenge the authority of foolish rulers (in Homer's Iliad). As a result, he gets a sound beating for Odysseus and a nasty caricature from Homer -- and the Trojan War continues.

The thread about Thomas the Tank Engine, and steam locomotive whistles reminded me of the Doppler Effect:

Doppler Effect, in physics, the apparent variation in frequency of any emitted wave, such as a wave of light or sound, as the source of the wave approaches or moves away, relative to an observer. The effect takes its name from the Austrian physicist Christian Johann Doppler, who first stated the physical principle in 1842. Doppler's principle explains why, if a source of sound of a constant pitch is moving toward an observer, the sound seems higher in pitch, whereas if the source is moving away it seems lower. This change in pitch can be heard by an observer listening to the whistle of an express train from a station platform or another train. The lines in the spectrum of a luminous body such as a star are similarly shifted toward the violet if the distance between the star and the earth is decreasing and toward the red if the distance is increasing. By measuring this shift, the relative motion of the earth and the star can be calculated (see Red Shift).



"Doppler Effect," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

By measuring this shift, the relative motion of the earth and the star can be calculated (see Red Shift).

And further: the distance to a star can be determined by measuring its red shift. The shift is proportional to the speed of movement to-or-from the observer, and (in the case of stars) that speed is proportional to the distance to the star.

Another eponym: The Dagwood Sandwich,
as illustrated at http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/forbetter/

Note: after today, this link won't give you the right illustration, but for the next month you can find it there by clicking back to today's date.