Hey. "On the bus or off the bus" comes from Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, as in Tom Wolfe's the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

It means you get it or you don't. You're there or you're not. I mean it as there IS a right answer or there's not. I'm looking for a rhetorical term for a specific phenomenon (a class of things named after/named in homage to another class of things - NO PROPER NAMES involved) and it either has a name in rhetoric i.e. Latin, or it does not!

And I do not believe eponym is the term for which I'm searching. According to all I've read, eponym involves A PROPER NAME on one side of the equation or the other, e.g. note the quote from BranShea [thank you] "ONE whose name" is, i.e. the name of an actual PERSON, for example Caesar as in Caesarian.

But let's keep trying. Really. I wanna KNOW!!!!

Last edited by allisondbl; 06/12/11 06:59 AM.