https://www.ultimatevocabulary.com/all-about-english-books-on-the-english-language/ Thu, 20 Sep 2012 21:36:38 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.38 https://www.ultimatevocabulary.com/all-about-english-books-on-the-english-language/comment-page-1/#comment-8423 Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:26:22 +0000 http://www.ultimatevocabulary.com/?p=1607#comment-8423 […] One of the books we recently recommended gives the history of words such as “sandwich” and “silhouette” whose eponymous originators have often been forgotten. Eponymous is an adjective that designates someone whose name has been given to something else (from the Greek eponymos, “given-upon name”). For example, the restaurants Guy Savoy in Paris, Joel Robuchon in Las Vegas, and Tetsuya’s in Sydney are all named after their founding eponymous chefs; the Julian calendar is named for the eponymous Roman leader who codified it (Julius Caesar); and the Elizabethan Era in British history is so called after the eponymous queen, Elizabeth I (even though Elizabeth II is currently on the throne). Many things have been named after their inventors (the Geiger counter, Morse code, the Venn diagram) but are so common and familiar now that although they’re still capitalized, we rarely associated the names with their eponymous inventors. […]

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