One linguistic way of achieving immortality is for your name to become part of the language and potentially, therefore, survive indefinitely.
Adjectival forms like Churchillian “relating to, or characteristic of, Sir Winston Churchill”, which are derived from the name of a well-known person by the addition of a suffix – in this case -ian – are common enough. Churchillian is now found in most English-language dictionaries. However, the majority of such adjectives are destined not to be so long-lived. The word Trudgillian, for example, has occurred in print a few times that I know of in a linguistics context, but it is highly unlikely that it will find a permanent presence in any dictionary.
The suffix -esque can be employed in a similar way. Cricket aficionados will immediately understand what Bradmanesque signifies in connection with a dominant batting performance. And Picassoesque will readily be understood by very many people even if they are not art lovers.
More interesting, perhaps, are purer forms where the name remains unchanged, without suffixes – such as boycott “to withdraw from interaction with someone as a protest” – and which have become so well integrated linguistically that they have lost their original initial capital letters.
The origins of the word boycott, which first appeared in print in 1880, lie in 19th-century Irish history. Captain Charles Boycott was a much disliked exploitative land agent in Ireland who, because of a campaign against him by his tenants and employees, eventually found that he no longer had any labourers or servants.
The possibility that this form of linguistic immortality might be less than desirable is reinforced by another verb with a negative connotation that has its origin in a man’s name, gerrymander. The American politician Elbridge Gerry was the governor of Massachusetts who signed into law a bill creating a strangely shaped electoral district which looked like a salamander on a map; the new district boundaries were designed to favour his own political party over the others, a clear corruption of the democratic process.
Sadism, from the name of the infamous Marquis de Sade, is another example of achieving a form of immortality in an unsavoury way. The same is true of masochism, from the surname of the Austrian aristocrat Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
A more neutral form of immortality was achieved by the Austrian doctor Franz Mesmer, who was forced to emigrate to France after having been accused of fraud in his homeland. Mesmer – who was, as it happens, a friend of Haydn and Mozart – claimed that many benefits could be derived from hypnotism or, as it came to be known, mesmerism.
The 18th-century French writer and politician Étienne de Silhouette would probably have been rather happier about his own linguistic immortality, which seems to have no negative connotations – although the Oxford English Dictionary does suggest that the word silhouette initially was “intended to ridicule the petty economies introduced by Silhouette” while he was Controller General in 1759.
The Belgian Adolphe Saxe achieved his immortality very happily through his invention of the musical instrument which we now call the saxophone, which he received a patent for in 1846.
But on balance it would seem that it would be better for most of us to remain in surname obscurity. Would anybody truly be happy to be remembered, like Henry Shrapnel, as the inventor of a type of shell which has killed and maimed countless numbers of people?
AFICIONADO
The noun aficionado – “knowledgeable enthusiast” – is the past participle of the Spanish verb aficionar “to become fond of” which ultimately comes from afición “affection”. The word was originally used in Spanish in connection with bullfighting; it first appeared in English in 1802 with the meaning of “amateur bullfighter”.
