Eponyms

Rob Bell:
Almost by definition, eponyms will always have a story.

I've seen them described as little invisible monuments, a kind of nod that says, I was here, I started this.

Jono Hey:
One of them I didn't know was the Jacuzzi.

Rob Bell:
That's the one that makes me laugh the most, because you've drawn them with little hairs on their chests.

Tom Pellereau:
And the fact that it's the Jacuzzi brothers.

Rob Bell:
The Jacuzzi brothers.

Jono Hey:
It's just such a fabulous name.

Tom Pellereau:
Lord Sugar has actually stated what the definition of a Pellereau is in my last board meeting.

When you touch your left ear by using your right arm and you go over the top of your head, that is apparently, in his belief, that's a Pellereau.

That sort of example of massively overcomplicating something for apparently no seeming reason.

Rob Bell:
Hello and welcome to Sketchplanations, The Podcast.

Coming at you every other Thursday, quenching your thirst for curiosity and wonder at life's quirks and quiddities.

Inspired by the collection of sketches at sketchplanations.com.

I'm engineer and broadcaster Rob Bell and with me once again is designer and creator of Sketchplanations, Jono Hey, and established entrepreneur and past winner of The Apprentice.

It's Tom Pellereau.

Hello, you two little munchable misfits.

Jono Hey:
I've never been called a munchable misfit before.

Well, I like it.

Rob Bell:
Good.

Tom Pellereau:
I don't like it quite so much.

Rob Bell:
It's an endearing term, I feel, a misfit.

Tom Pellereau:
Munchable.

Rob Bell:
That's just lazy alliteration.

Tom Pellereau:
Macho misfit.

It could have been an option.

Rob Bell:
There you go.

Hello, you two big macho misfits.

Jono Hey:
I'm not sure how accurate we're being there, though.

Rob Bell:
Doesn't matter, it's the intro.

Tom Pellereau:
No one knows.

Rob Bell:
This time, we're talking eponyms, when the name or word for something comes from a person or a place associated with it.

As a quick example, the sandwich.

Now, I absolutely love Jono's sketch for this because there's so much colour and character that's caught in the figures he's depicted.

And obviously, they make me laugh.

It should be up on your device screens now as the artwork for this episode.

But if not, or if you want to take a closer look, you can see it at sketchplanations.com.

And this week especially, I'd advise you to check it out because Jono's linked to 60 other sketches in his collection up there that are also eponyms, right?

So it's really worth going onto sketchplanations.com to check it out and read the caption and look at all the ones that it could be.

In that intro itself is a flavour to where we're going to go with the podcast.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us about anything in this episode or any others, for that matter, then you can send your emails to hello at sketchplanations.com.

Thank you, Tommy.

Also, let's get into exactly what an eponym is.

Let's throw out some fun examples and consider some of the less obvious implications of this trend.

Let's podcast.

Jono, please, can you kick us off by telling us a bit more about eponyms and why they caught your attention enough to want to explain them in one of your sketches?

Jono Hey:
Sometimes doing a sketchplanation is an opportunity for me to be really sure that I know something.

And if you're like me, you might have heard the word eponym or eponymous.

And perhaps at one point you knew what it meant.

And perhaps you thought you kind of knew what it meant.

And perhaps you sort of sometimes forgot what it meant anyway.

That was what was happening with me.

I'd be like, oh yeah, eponymous.

That's, I think it's...

Rob Bell:
Yeah, that's the thing.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Anyway, so I was like, I think I need to do a sketch to be sure about this once I, once I confirmed indeed that it was what I thought it was.

And, and I just thought it's quite a fun one to do because there's actually, there's some really neat examples of eponyms and some of them are really nice examples of something, essentially something that's named after somebody, but you didn't always realise that it was named after somebody and you gave one...

Rob Bell:
Yeah, I'd say some, some surprising ones.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, and one of your intro, which I really like is the sandwich.

Of course, I do know that now and I'd probably learn that at some point, 15 years ago or something.

But certainly as a kid growing up, it's just a sandwich, right?

It could be like a baguette or a bun or something like that, right?

Yeah.

You don't realize actually it comes from the Fourth Earl of Sandwich.

And so I just thought it's quite fun to collect a few together and put it down for the record and go like, if you've heard this and you're not 100% sure all the time what it is, now you will know for good what an eponym is.

Rob Bell:
Do you want to go through the, so there's six examples in your sketch.

Do you want to just go through them?

Just quickly, one of them is the Fourth Earl of Sandwich who invented the sandwich.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Can we get on to some of the stories of them, perhaps in the future of the episode?

Another one is really classic.

Well, the first one that came to mind was the Rubik's Cube, which everybody knows.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, good.

Jono Hey:
One of them I didn't know, I think, until I started looking up eponyms and reading up about it was the Jacuzzi.

Rob Bell:
I love that.

That's the one that makes me laugh the most because you've drawn them with little hairs on their chests.

I love it.

Jono Hey:
I am.

Tom Pellereau:
And the fact that it's the Jacuzzi brothers.

Rob Bell:
The Jacuzzi brothers.

Jono Hey:
It's just such a fabulous name.

Apparently, there was, I mentioned it, there was like a lawsuit between the brothers later on in life and the lawsuit was called Jacuzzi vs Jacuzzi, which is a pretty cool lawsuit, isn't it?

It's a nice name.

Yeah, so I got them relaxing with a cocktail and some hairy chests in the Jacuzzi of their own making.

Laszlo Biro, a biro for the pens.

In the US, I believe people are more familiar with the Bic pen, which is also an eponym after somebody Bic who came up with a pen, which is so popular and cheap and everywhere.

Diesel, Diesel Fuel, which you might not realize is named after somebody in person, but it's named after Rudolf Diesel.

And there was the original sort of Diesel Engines, which is also named after him.

And then a brilliant one, one of my favorite, which is the Silhouette.

Rob Bell:
That blew my mind that one.

And I've got, yeah, I've got got questions about that one.

Etienne de Silhouette, right?

Jono Hey:
It was named after Etienne de Silhouette and the brief history of that.

He was this French politician during a tough time when they'd had some like extravagant spending.

And he was like the...

Rob Bell:
It's like the treasurer, right?

Jono Hey:
Yeah, a guy in charge of the finance thing.

And so, you know, like a good politician, he made some tough decisions and put a period of austerity which nobody liked.

And a silhouetted portrait where you just basically do an outline of somebody became quite popular because it was really cheap and quick to do.

So instead of getting a fancy portrait, you just get like a silhouetted portrait because you didn't have enough money to do a proper one.

So a light and a guy with a pen.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, charcoal possibly.

Jono Hey:
Charcoal, exactly.

Rob Bell:
So it became synonymous as well as eponymous, but it became synonymous as being like a cheaper version, right?

Because Etienne de Silhouette was slashing stuff and was a bit cheap, is that what we've seen?

Jono Hey:
Well, I mean, I think he was trying to fix the country's finances, but people didn't like it.

So it's a bit of a slight on him as far as I know.

It's like, oh, we'll call this a silhouette because he's penny pinching.

Rob Bell:
What troubles me about this is that the French word for shadow is silhouette.

Tom Pellereau:
What?

Rob Bell:
But did that come after the silhouette?

Tom Pellereau:
Possibly.

Shadows were around before, surely.

Jono Hey:
Oh, it's a remarkable coincidence.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Let's investigate that.

Rob Bell:
I struggle with that.

Jono Hey:
Provide the answer at the end of the podcast.

Rob Bell:
Great.

Tom Pellereau:
And what I quite like about Etienne Silhouette is Etienne is my middle name.

Not a lot of people know that and it's fairly unusual.

It's quite nice to see how you actually spell it.

You've always struggled a little bit.

It's not your own name.

Jono Hey:
You can always look up the eponyms.

Rob Bell:
To be honest, I mean, as someone who's dyslexic, your name, I mean, it's very ironic.

Tom Pellereau:
It's a real trouble starter.

I genuinely at school, at primary school, I used to have to look at my name tag in my socks to ensure I'd spelled my surname properly.

Rob Bell:
Fair enough.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, I do remember doing that when I was very young.

Rob Bell:
Fair enough.

Tom Pellereau:
Not very young.

Jono Hey:
I remember somebody tutored a kid who was dyslexic and his name was Giuseppe Farinelli.

Yeah.

And you're like, well, if you're five, you're no child.

Tom Pellereau:
We digress, potentially.

Rob Bell:
We digress and we only laugh because it's over, you're here.

Tom Pellereau:
Thank you.

Rob Bell:
But it strikes me like almost by definition, right?

Eponyms typically will always have a story.

Yes.

Right.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, that was one of the things where there's a really nice podcast episode of The 99% Invisible by Roman Mars about eponyms.

And he discusses, he says that eponyms are one of his favorite things because by definition, whenever there's an eponym, it's come from something or someone.

And so there's a history behind this word.

Whereas like, I mean, you can look at where the word bun came from, but it's probably much less interesting than sandwich, which has a real story behind it.

Rob Bell:
Bum or bun?

Jono Hey:
I said bun.

Rob Bell:
Sorry.

Jono Hey:
Because that's back on the bread products.

Rob Bell:
Gotcha.

Jono Hey:
Or bum, I don't know.

Probably doesn't have as interesting story.

Rob Bell:
I've seen them described as little invisible monuments.

A kind of nod that says, I was here, I started this.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

And actually, it's quite interesting because some people choose the name to be named after them.

And maybe we'll get to it.

But something like the Dyson vacuum cleaner.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
They chose that.

Whereas other things, Etienne de Silhouette didn't choose it to be called de Silhouette, right?

And he probably didn't want it to be.

Tom Pellereau:
And some of them are definitely a slant towards that person.

Like, they really didn't want to be named after that, but it kind of caught on as a kind of slur towards the individual potential.

Jono Hey:
There's a really nice book by somebody who have done a number of sketches from Mark Forsythe called The Etymologicon, which is all about etymology, which is where words came from.

And he gives an example of the word masochism, which is after, let me get it right.

Is it an eponym?

Yeah, it's an eponym after Leopold von Sacko-Massoch, who wrote this book called Venus in Furs, all about dominant women wearing furs, and pushing him around.

And it came named as masochism.

During his lifetime, it was invented by a psychiatrist, and he was like, I don't really like that term.

It came named after me, but here we are, it's stuck.

Rob Bell:
So I feel like we'll probably go through quite a few examples, because they're fun and interesting.

And for me, it's like gathering all these little stories together, and I love that.

So come on, Tommy, have you got some examples or an example to kick us off with?

Tom Pellereau:
So as an inventor, as a creator of products, I love looking into the history of where things come from.

And first of all, it's amazing how names just created it, right?

Almost everything has a name, and you often kind of wonder where it all came from.

And firstly, the scientific concepts that we have, the Volt, the Watt, the Ohm, the Amp, the Tesla, all these things are named after the person who created it, you know, Voltaire, Ohm, Tesla.

But like, these were scientists of hundreds of years ago in most instances, I think, Jono.

A lot of this scientific sort of research happened and discoveries, and they were, they were that person, or they were the person who was credited with it sometimes.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, that's interesting.

Tom Pellereau:
Which is very interesting, because there were probably actually 10, 20 people working.

Often there were loads of women also helping, and they obviously didn't get mentioned at all.

And Marie Curie, who worked with her husband, the Curies, they are, she's one of the most sort of famed early scientists.

But all these things need a name, and so often they're then hooked on the scientist who was most researching it at the time.

Jono Hey:
In that sort of context, it's almost like the definition of success in your life.

Like I did my research, and I came up with something, and it's named after to me, and everybody's using that now.

Job done.

Tom Pellereau:
Isn't that cool?

Rob Bell:
So you know how Dyson, naming his brand of products, that's not an eponym.

That's a brand that's been decided after a name.

Yeah.

But do you think you could kind of seed it in?

Like, I've heard people have started calling this the Dyson.

It's a bit embarrassing.

And then that kind of rumour starts to spread, and people actually do start calling it the Dyson.

And then, oh, have you got, oh, you're Dysoning again.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

And actually, in high time, I look back at my Curve Now file, should have called that Pellereau, really.

That would have been quite cool.

Although I was advised actually by the lawyer who represented me when I did the apprentice contract with Lord Sugar, not to involve my own name, because then technically Lord Sugar would own half of my name.

So I was told, you know, probably don't call the company Pellereau, probably don't call your product Pellereau, because then technically you are going to have to sign the rights to your name away.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Tom Pellereau:
It's quite interesting.

I do actually think it would have been quite fun though, this interesting kind of ego.

Rob Bell:
You got to wait until you design something circular, that's all like a ring donut shape, because then it's the Pella O.

Tom Pellereau:
Amazing.

Thank you, Robbie.

So save that one away.

Rob Bell:
There's lots in science and maths and physics, aren't there?

And I've got the Fibonacci sequence, the sum of the two numbers that come before it in a sequence.

So one plus one is two plus one and two.

Anyway, you know what I mean.

Anyway, named after Leonardo de Pisa, whose nickname was Fibonacci, or aka Fibonacci.

But he didn't invent it, he only popularised it.

So it's one of those.

And then Pythagoras, apparently he didn't discover Pythagoras either.

Was that right?

But the name stuck with him.

Or, as a Scottish guy here, I went to school with, did my GCSEs with, called it Pythagoras.

Tom Pellereau:
Pythagoras?

Sounds more mysterious.

Rob Bell:
Bernoulli, can I chuck another one in there?

Tom Pellereau:
The Bernoulli equation.

Rob Bell:
The Bernoulli equation, yeah.

The Bernoulli principle with like air pressure and air flows.

Tom Pellereau:
We are in danger of becoming a highly technical only podcast here.

Rob Bell:
No, it won't, because check this out.

So the famous Bernoulli equation or Bernoulli principle that I know and that we all know is what describes what keeps airplanes up in the air, right?

It's the airflow over the wings or partly what does that.

But apparently, there were about eight different Bernoullis all involved in maths and engineering and they're all in the same family, right?

And apparently, there were massive arguments between a lot of them.

So there was Johann Bernoulli, who stole the credit for his brother Jacob's discoveries, right?

And they weren't the one we're talking about.

They weren't the Bernoulli principle that we're talking about here with airflow.

And then Johann's son, Daniel Bernoulli, he was the one who came up with the air pressure stuff, Bernoulli's principle.

He won a prestigious scientific prize for his discoveries, only for his dad to enter the competition as well, who came second and they never spoke again.

It's the story.

It's the human story behind the eponyms.

Jono Hey:
Ridiculous family.

Rob Bell:
I know.

Tom Pellereau:
And on that note, can I kind of talk to you about the Ferris Wheel?

Rob Bell:
Come on, bring it on.

Tom Pellereau:
Invented by George Washington Ferris Jr.

in 1893, a civil engineer who designed the Ferris Wheel as an attraction for the Chicago World Exposé that year.

It was designed as the American answer to the Eiffel Tower, which had been the big thing at the Paris Exposé the previous year.

But it didn't really work out, unfortunately, for Mr.

Ferris in the fact that there was a lot of arguments about actually who deserved the money from it and the profits.

He died a kind of pauper, aged 37, having his wife walked out on him, and he died penniless of a horrible disease.

So it wasn't necessarily the greatest thing, but he was an engineer.

And the first one was big.

It's like 80-odd meters tall, the first one.

Jono Hey:
It's like the London Eye or something.

Tom Pellereau:
Which is like pretty big.

It's like, oh, we're just going to design the first one.

I'll make the first one, make it massive.

Jono Hey:
Well, if you're trying to compete with the Eiffel Tower, you go big or go home.

Tom Pellereau:
Wow, yeah.

Rob Bell:
But I feel like probably a number of eponyms are allocated or adopted posthumously, after whoever that person is has died.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Although the Kalashnikov, considered the Kalashnikov rifle, considered the most deadly weapon ever created by Mikhail Kalashnikov, who was drafted to the Soviet Army as a tank engineer and driver, and rise really high.

He became Lieutenant General, which is like the third off from the very top.

Apparently, he created it whilst he'd been injured in the Second World War, and he heard all these complaints about how rifles just kept on jamming and wouldn't really work and all that sort of stuff.

But do you know why it's called the AK-47?

Rob Bell:
Oh, I do.

Tom Pellereau:
I can't remember.

Jono Hey:
It's not like WD-40s.

It's like the 40th scale of it.

Tom Pellereau:
Sort of similar.

It's Automatic or Automato Kalashnikov, created in 1947, originally.

Rob Bell:
Great.

Tom Pellereau:
AK-47.

Rob Bell:
Good, Tommy.

Jono Hey:
You could have the AP-25, the Auto Pellereau in 2025.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, good.

There's a lot of rumors towards the end of his life that he kind of regretted it, but he was a Soviet hero.

It's still one of the cheapest rifles you can make because it's just printed sheet metal, bits of wood, and it just keeps on working and working and working.

It's what has been so devastatingly lethal.

Jono Hey:
See, that's an interesting point about an eponym, isn't it?

See, this has your name on it and has killed god knows how many people.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

So it's a curious legacy.

I mean, if you're inventing guns, you probably expect that to be the case, but whether you want to be remembered for it, I don't know.

Rob Bell:
And there will be a number like that.

I've got a story of one where...

Jono Hey:
What is that story?

Rob Bell:
Well, I'm actually wondering if it's the other way around.

So I will edit this bit out here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Tom Pellereau:
How to be the editor?

Rob Bell:
So this is more what happens in the case where...

So something's named after someone who then later goes on to kind of become infamous, or to have not lived a good life beyond what they might have already done.

Tom Pellereau:
So Hitler's early paintings weren't as popular as they might have been, for example.

Rob Bell:
What do you know?

This does come to Nazis.

Tom Pellereau:
Okay.

Rob Bell:
So this is in the case of the Reiter syndrome, named after Hans Reiter.

So it's kind of a joint pain that's tied to a form of systemic inflammation by all accounts, according to my notes here.

And it's named after the German physician, Hans Reiter.

So this is in the early part of the 20th century, after World War I.

And he'd worked with injured soldiers in World War I and discovered that this was a condition.

And so that condition became known after him, the Reiter syndrome.

And then in the Second World War, he went on to commit Nazi war crimes, experimenting on inmates at a detention camp.

But it kind of became known as the Reiter syndrome in like 1940.

And then obviously in the 41, 42, 43, Reiter wasn't such a great chap contributing to humankind.

So then what happens to that eponym?

Do, collectively as a culture, do we just say, right?

No, we need to change it.

Or is it done officially?

What happens to that?

It's a bit like the statues, right?

It's a bit like statues to figures.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Or street names.

Rob Bell:
With dubious pasts or street names.

Exactly.

Jono Hey:
Things like that, that you might just want to go, you know what?

We don't want to remember that person anymore.

Given what happened, perhaps we should change it.

Rob Bell:
So there's that side to eponyms, which I found interesting.

I hadn't thought about that.

I hadn't thought about that at all.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

There was another one that they mentioned in the 99% Invisible podcast.

I thought it was really interesting.

It was a lot of medical conditions are named after the people who sort of isolated or observed it, or sometimes the people who suffered from it.

So, you know, if you suffered from some terrible debilitating thing, would you want it named after you if you were the only person?

Maybe not so much, but I think that definitely happens.

There was another one like well-known diseases, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, CJD that became known as, right?

Jono Hey:
Yeah, exactly.

And so there's mad cow disease.

I believe so, yeah.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
But there's an argument, you know, I think the actual name for it is subacute spongiform encephalopathy, which actually is a name which tells you about what is going on in the disease, actually is informative in its name, as opposed to one which is just sort of recognizing the people who observed it first.

Rob Bell:
So those words, what were they again?

Jono Hey:
You're just trying to trip me up.

I see it as subacute spongiform encephalopathy.

Rob Bell:
That's right.

So those actually are describing the condition, like in terms of the system of the body or...

Jono Hey:
This is what happens to your brain, yeah.

Rob Bell:
Right.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

In the name of the condition, which is probably quite sensible.

Rob Bell:
Which could be helpful.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
If you're learning it.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
You know, if you're learning about it.

Jono Hey:
But that has a good example also of what you mentioned, where you have Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

And perhaps there were lots of other people who were also involved in some form or other in the observing and identifying this condition, but get left off the name.

Rob Bell:
Because Creutzfeldt-Jakob, that's two people, is it?

Creutzfeldt and Jakob.

Jono Hey:
I believe so.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, I think it is.

But you're saying that there might have been a whole team of people who were involved in that research?

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

And, you know, normally, there are just like in any science and engineering, it's very rarely is it one person who really does everything, right?

So, yeah, eponyms are a curious thing where you choose, we're going to tell this, we're going to give it to this person.

It's a bit like, you know, the Nobel Prize was that challenge, one person gets the Nobel Prize, but a lot of other people enabled, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
And, but we only remember the winners or the people who get their eponyms.

Tom Pellereau:
And that potentially brings me to an interesting one, which is one of the most famous is the Hoover or To Hoover the Carpet.

Well, that sort of stuff, and you mentioned Dyson earlier.

He obviously has a dislike for this, but Hoover was actually invented by James Spangler, which could have been an interesting name, The Spangler, but who invented it for his cousin, Susan Hoover and her husband William Hoover, who then brought it to life.

Enormous effort to make Hoover into the incredible company that it became and still is.

But it was named after them rather than him.

Still an eponym, clearly.

But it's ironic that it's one of the most famous, and yet Hoover is possibly one of the ones who actually invented it.

Rob Bell:
It's also about Pythagoras as well, and Fibonacci.

It's whoever shouts the loudest, whoever starts spreading those rumors around.

Tom Pellereau:
It tends to be whoever wins the war writes the history.

Rob Bell:
There you go, Tommy, that's it.

Jono Hey:
I listened to a book called Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey recently.

And he tells the story of his career.

He basically kept getting all these rom-coms roles, and he was doing really well getting rom-coms.

And then he was like, no, I want to do stuff that really speaks to me.

And so he said no to all these roles for ages, and then basically didn't get anything for two years.

And then finally, he did get something.

He was being interviewed by a reporter, and he says in the book that he felt like it ought to have a name, this period of him not doing anything.

And he said he was speaking with this reporter.

And he said, you know, I was having a chat with the reporter, and he said, oh, it's kind of like a McConaissance.

And this reporter said, wow, that's great.

Maybe that could stick.

And it became the name of the McConaissance.

His period was absolutely seeded by him, quite deliberately.

It's worked a charm.

Rob Bell:
It would do if it was Matthew McConaughey, because he probably can charm you.

Probably rather, rather well.

Tom Pellereau:
For sure.

Rob Bell:
That's very good.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
Can I come back to the Hoover one?

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
Because I wonder about brands.

Can brands be eponyms?

I think it is, just because, so Tommy, the example you're talking about there, the Hoover.

Hoover is a brand name for a, it's a brand of vacuum cleaner, right?

But it's become, and I will you just, it's become synonymous with the vacuum cleaner.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

My understanding is it's a proprietary eponym.

So in principle, they're the only ones who are supposed to be able to use it.

And there's this really good term, I don't know if you guys came across it, called, it's called genericide, which is basically like death by being made generic.

Tom Pellereau:
And it can counteract your trademark.

Jono Hey:
Exactly.

And so this is where all these companies struggle against.

So Hoover, we might think, oh, it's brilliant that everybody calls everything just Hoover.

I'm going to Hoover the carpet.

And they go, no, this is terrible because it devalues our brand.

And anybody can call their product Hoover in the carpet now.

Rob Bell:
I bought this Hoover and it's rubbish.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
Well, actually mine, not the Hoover.

Jono Hey:
It's a vacuum cleaner.

Yeah, exactly.

So yeah, there's this great term called, I thought it was brilliant, Genericide, which is, yeah, death because you became so generic.

And obviously like, you're Google-ing it.

Oh, I'm going to Google instead of I'm going to search.

And so some brands fight very hard against that Genericide.

Rob Bell:
That's interesting.

Yeah, okay.

It's something else I learned about where a brand becomes a verb or a noun, like Google, Hoover, is that apparently when you're using it as a verb or noun, you shouldn't be using the capital letter if there is a capital letter.

So I'm hoovering the carpet with a Hoover.

Tom Pellereau:
You have a small h on the first one and a big one on the second one, and then a little tm after it if you're being really particular.

Rob Bell:
So is that the same with Google though as well?

Oh, where did you find that?

I googled it.

Would that just be with the lowercase g?

I googled it.

Tom Pellereau:
You think their name is, yes, by the sound of it?

Jono Hey:
I mean, technically, you're not supposed to do that, but yeah, I don't know.

Rob Bell:
Are they going to get me?

They're going to come after me on the podcast.

Jono Hey:
Google Trademark Police.

Tom Pellereau:
I think you can't write that on packaging if you're a investor.

Jono Hey:
There were some other really good ones like Hoover, which I didn't realize at all, just like Sandwich.

Like Zippa.

Zippa was the name of some boots which had like the first hookless fastener in.

Tom Pellereau:
Oh, right.

Jono Hey:
And now, Zippa is obviously, everybody makes Zippa and it's not just Zippa, but Zippa was a product originally.

Rob Bell:
Didn't know that one.

Tom Pellereau:
There is one company that really dominates the Zippa market.

Rob Bell:
YKK.

Yeah, somehow, like Japanese.

Jono Hey:
Can you make a new better Zippa, please?

Tom Pellereau:
I really don't think it's possible.

They are amazing.

Like the intricacies and the repeatability and the reliability is insane.

Jono Hey:
In 100 years, we'll still be using the same.

Tom Pellereau:
I do think about it quite a lot, though, Jono.

Jono Hey:
Just Escalator.

Do you know that?

Rob Bell:
That was Escalator?

Jono Hey:
Escalator was a brand name from the Otis Elevator company.

Rob Bell:
And no brand name, sorry.

Jono Hey:
And it has passed into such general use that they've lost all trademarks and anybody can call their product an Escalator now.

Wow.

I think Thermos are in a similar position, but...

Tom Pellereau:
Also, a trademark doesn't last forever.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Tom Pellereau:
A lot of these companies try to turn their products from like a trademark into a copyright, because copyright lasts 70 years.

Patents last 18, trademarks 25 and on, copyright 70.

I think they're trying to extend that at the moment.

And works of art also have slightly different rules as well, which is a fascinating aspect of intellectual property law.

Jono Hey:
That's really good knowledge.

Tom Pellereau:
Kind of what I do is quite an important part of it.

Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Thank you.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Good knowledge.

There was a brilliant, hilarious video of lawyers at Velcro singing, Please Don't Call It Velcro.

If it's not made by Velcro, it's a hook and loop basically.

And you should definitely watch it.

It was about three minutes, about three minutes long.

Rob Bell:
I will link to that in the podcast description.

Jono Hey:
I didn't even know.

You know, I thought Velcro was just the name for the thing, but it's not.

Velcro is a Velcro brand, apparently.

Tom Pellereau:
But was it named after Velcro?

Because Tupperware is named after Mr.

Tupper.

I do reckon you could have a lot of fun with people being like, yeah, there was a Mr.

Post-It.

Jono Hey:
You can say that about your kids.

You know, your kids don't believe anything.

Tom Pellereau:
Mr.

TV.

Rob Bell:
So I did look to see if there are eponyms around our surnames.

Bell, obviously.

Pellereau and Hey.

Bell, there's quite a few.

There's the brand Bell's Whiskey.

And then the Bell Curve.

Tom Pellereau:
You've been very busy.

Rob Bell:
Diving Bell.

Jono Hey:
What a family.

Tom Pellereau:
I mean, it's unbelievable.

Jono Hey:
It's the Jacuzzi's, the Bernoulli's and the Bell's.

Unbelievable.

Rob Bell:
I couldn't find anything on Pellereau Hey.

I don't think it's been ever been used.

Tom Pellereau:
The spelling has changed.

Jono Hey:
It's just waiting for me to make my own eponym.

Tom Pellereau:
Robbie, ironically, I am told that my name comes from a type of boat, Pellereau.

So it's obviously water at the end and Pellereau is apparently a type of one person.

Jono Hey:
Short for propeller.

Tom Pellereau:
But it's a big round disc kind of thing you sit on.

From France.

So I'm told that that's where my name comes from.

Rob Bell:
Oh, very good.

Jono Hey:
There you go.

Rob Bell:
Nice.

That's entomology.

Is it?

Jono Hey:
No, entomology is the study of insects.

Oh crap.

Rob Bell:
Eptomology.

Jono Hey:
Eptomology is the study of insects.

Easy mistake to make.

Rob Bell:
Oh my God.

Tom Pellereau:
You're going to play with the big boys, Robby.

Jono Hey:
It happened in Trivial Pursuit once, so I know that.

Rob Bell:
Can I give you guys two that haven't come up?

It's my delight that they haven't come up.

I knew this would be an example heavy episode, because that's basically what we've got.

Can I talk about the word boycott, to boycott something?

Well, the Jeffrey.

Not the Jeffrey, the Charles.

Jono Hey:
You can't talk about it.

Rob Bell:
So boycott, I'm going to boycott.

I don't agree with them at all.

I'm going to boycott that event.

Tom Pellereau:
There was a individual.

Rob Bell:
There was a Charles boycott, who was an English, and I'm going to read this, is an English land agent in the 1880s in Ireland.

And he was working for a wealthy absentee landlord, right?

So he was looking after this land that the landlord owned, but wasn't really involved in it over in Ireland.

And at the time Irish tenant farmers were struggling under high rents and unfair evictions from land.

And so the Irish Land League, which was like a tenants rights movement, decided that they'd had enough.

And so when boycot tried to evict tenants from their land, the Land League came up with a new form of non-violent protest.

And instead of using violence, they simply ignored him out of existence.

His workers abandoned him, shops refused to serve him, the postman wouldn't deliver his mail, and he basically had to flee town because no one would engage with him in any way whatsoever.

Tom Pellereau:
And to make it even worse, they named it after him.

Rob Bell:
Well, and so yeah, the whole situation, that whole situation made headlines, and over in Ireland and in the UK, or and in Britain, I should say, and within months, boycott became the global term for an organized social ostracization.

Jono Hey:
How about that?

Rob Bell:
I love that one.

Tom Pellereau:
That's so harsh.

Jono Hey:
It was a great story.

I had no idea.

Rob Bell:
No, not at all.

Tom Pellereau:
It was brilliant.

Thank you, Robbie.

Jono Hey:
Well, it's like calling sort of a peaceful defiance, the Gandhi or something, isn't it?

Yeah.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, yeah.

You've been gandied.

Jono Hey:
I'm organizing a Gandhi.

Rob Bell:
So the other one, and you know, this is quite story heavy.

So the other one is the word maverick.

He's a right maverick.

Samuel Maverick was a Texan lawyer, politician, land baron in the mid 1800s.

And despite owning a ton of land and cattle, he didn't actually care about cows.

And so when his cattle started roaming the land, he famously refused to brand them, you know, like to brand them like everyone else did, because to him branding seemed cruel, unnecessary, and honestly a bit too much effort because he couldn't really be bothered.

So other ranches in the area started noticing that any unbranded free roaming cow was very much likely to be one of Mavericks.

So they started calling unbranded independent cattle Mavericks.

Tom Pellereau:
That's cool.

Rob Bell:
And over time, that word jumped species from cows to humans.

And so then to anyone who refuses to conform or does things their own way, they become known as a Maverick.

Jono Hey:
Unbranded and independent.

Rob Bell:
I thought those two were brilliant.

Boycott and Maverick.

Jono Hey:
Just a great way also to claim all of the...

If everybody else is branding their cows, it's a genius.

Then you get all the ones that are unbranded.

That's probably it.

Tom Pellereau:
And he's not doing any work, is he?

He's just got it.

Jono Hey:
Just relying on everybody else doing the work.

Just nailed it.

Rob Bell:
But the thing was that that wasn't his intention.

He wasn't being a Maverick.

And that's it.

He was just basically doing nothing because he couldn't be bothered.

Which is almost the opposite of the term Maverick.

Fun.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Look forward to the film by Tom Cruise.

Rob, you mentioned it, but yeah, I thought when I did this sketch, I thought, oh, actually, I'll label, I'll add a tag to all of the sketches I've got that are eponyms.

And it's now my number six most used category in Sketchplanations with...

Rob Bell:
Eponym...

Jono Hey:
.

eponym with 64 of them.

I didn't really realize that I'd have so many, but as you say, Campbell's Law, Dracula's Knees, Goldilocks Tasks, Douglas Fur, Mobius Strip, Spoonerisms, it just goes on and on.

It's amazing.

Rob Bell:
We've done a number of them on the podcast.

Tom Pellereau:
But that's the thing, everything needs a name, right, to define something.

I don't know, Jono, when we're creating new products, we kind of have to come up with names for things the whole time, or kind of a new presentation or something like that.

And I like just giving things names because then there's no confusion.

So everything needs a name.

So why not be named after either the person who's trying to slur or the person who made it up or where it came from.

And we haven't even got into food, you know, cheddar cheese.

Rob Bell:
It can work after a place as well, can't it?

An eponym can be a place.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, almost every food is named after classic food, you know, luxury food, potentially there's a lot.

Rob Bell:
Some, some foods.

Tom Pellereau:
There's a lot.

All cheeses.

I just put it as cheeses.

Jono Hey:
All cheeses.

Tom Pellereau:
Mostly cheeses.

Jono Hey:
Are there other food?

Tom Pellereau:
I'll stop.

Jono Hey:
Apple was named after Mr.

Apple.

Rob Bell:
You reminded me one earlier, Tommy, when you talked about Tupper, was it Mr.

Tupper for Tupperware?

Was it Thomas Crapper?

Tom Pellereau:
Well, seriously?

Rob Bell:
Yeah, the toilet came known as the Crapper.

Yeah, the toilet.

Kind of a colloquial eponym, a colloquium.

Tom Pellereau:
Policeman being called Bobbies after Robert Peel, who created the police force.

Rob Bell:
Is that right?

That would do.

Well, these are more colloquial ones.

Crapper, Bobby.

Tom Pellereau:
Maybe we should stop.

Rob Bell:
I also felt that that could suddenly...

I didn't have anything in mind, Tommy, but I just felt that that was going in some direction, which it didn't.

Tom Pellereau:
They always go in the direction.

Rob Bell:
It could do.

Jono Hey:
It could do.

Rob Bell:
The other context in which I'd heard the word eponymous or eponymously titled is music.

And in their eponymously titled album, Blur, or their eponymously titled album, The Strokes, Fleetwood Mac, Beyoncé, they've all done albums that were eponymously named.

Jono Hey:
Just named after themselves, yeah.

Rob Bell:
Aob, is there anything else anyone like to add before we round off our discussion on eponyms, which I have loved, by the way.

Jono Hey:
I'll just add that if you like language concepts and terms, one of the other reasons to do eponyms was I've actually done lots of these kind of pieces of language, so you'll find sketches on acronyms and initialisms and capitanims and heteronyms and homonyms and homographs and homophones and a few others on Sketchplanations if you want to follow the links.

Rob Bell:
And I will second that because most of the reason I know what those are or have heard of those things is because of Jono's sketches, although I do get confused between them every now and then.

But hey, guess what?

There's a really easy way for me to find out what's what again.

sketchplanations.com.

Thank you, Jono.

I want to add something, if I may.

Use of eponyms in a historical context.

Example, you're writing a historical novel and you think, oh, let's bang in something here about, oh, they were a real maverick, which was like 1800s, but your novel was based in the 1600s, let's say.

In which case you can't use the term maverick because it hadn't been invented at the time of when you're setting your novel or setting your story.

I enjoyed that.

I enjoyed that little thought experiment.

Jono Hey:
So like an anachronism from by using something you hadn't yet been inventing.

You've got like a period drama, but somebody's vacuuming the floor with a hoover.

Rob Bell:
If someone says, hey, you should go and hoover that floor.

But it's before the time the hoover was invented.

But vacuums were around.

Jono Hey:
That would be a subtle one for somebody to point out, wouldn't it?

Rob Bell:
But I just enjoyed that.

I enjoyed that little nuance within it all.

Jono Hey:
No, that's good.

Rob Bell:
And this is way too gruesome for the podcast.

But if you are interested in that little tidbit headline that I just gave you, the eponym embedded into the expression Sweet Fanny Adams.

If you look up Fanny Adams and who she was, it's quite a story, quite a story.

Jono Hey:
Incognito.

Rob Bell:
Tommy, anything else you'd like to add?

No, I'm all good.

It's all good.

Lovely.

What are takeaways from this episode then?

I mean, one takeaway is that there are a lot of eponyms that are very, very surprising.

Can I give my takeaway first?

Jono Hey:
Do it.

Rob Bell:
I'm working a little bit on the art of storytelling at the moment, aside from the podcast.

And what I'd like to highlight from this episode is how almost every eponym by its very nature is this kind of little short story.

And I think now I've made that connection.

I've got this perfect excuse to start forming this little collection of eponym stories in my mind.

And it is mainly for my own curiosity, but the other benefit is that they'll probably always be there, hopefully in my head, if I need to pull out the old anecdote every now and then, I don't know, a dinner party, let's say.

So that little connection between stories and eponyms was really powerful for me.

I love that about what we found out in this episode.

Definitely.

Jono Hey:
Love it.

Rob Bell:
Any other takeaways?

Jono Hey:
I don't know if it's a takeaway or not, but my thought was a little bit into some of the discussion we had early on was that, in some ways, having an eponym is like the definition of success.

If you're like a scientist or something, or if you're an astronomer and you spot Halley's Comet and it's called Halley's Comet, you're like, oh yeah, I did a good thing.

But it's a bit of a strange thing to name something after you.

So I think the best ones are where somebody else chooses to name something after you, assuming that you've done something good.

Tom Pellereau:
The Hubble Telescope, that kind of stuff.

Although it happened years after he died.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, it's probably better if they do it before or after you die.

Rob Bell:
Typically, it would be like journalists, right, that would start using that term in a public context.

Is that right?

Jono Hey:
So my takeaway is you have to do Matthew McConaughey's strategy and seed it with the journalists secretly, but invent them yourselves.

Rob Bell:
I love it.

I look forward to the next few articles and interviews that you do, Jono, where the journalist starts talking about, yeah, I'm really starting to hey that.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, everybody's calling me that these days.

Rob Bell:
They are.

Jono Hey:
That's why I heard that.

Tom Pellereau:
When you draw something really intellectual and you make it very easy to understand, you know, sort of when you hey something, I do that, you know, pay somebody a bit of money to start talking about it that way.

Yeah.

So Lord Sugar has actually stated what the definition of a Pellereau is in my last board meeting.

He said, can you repeat it?

If you ask someone to touch their left ear, what most people would do is they touch their left ear.

A Pellereau is when you touch your left ear by using your right arm and you go over the top of your head.

That is apparently in his belief, that's a Pellereau.

That sort of example of massively overcomplicating something.

For apparently no seeming reason, that's the definition of a Pellereau.

Rob Bell:
That's brilliant.

That's how these things start, Tommy.

Your legacy has just been set out.

Hopefully not.

Jono Hey:
We have a family one called a Tony.

Oh, good.

If you're having a party, but you've left it a bit late to get organized, what you do is in the afternoon of the party, you go to the supermarket and spend way too much money on food and beers, and bring it all back and then you've got an instant party, but you spend about five times as much as you intended.

Rob Bell:
This party has been totally tonified.

Jono Hey:
We were a bit short on time, so we just went into the Tony, but it's all good now.

We've already had a great time.

Rob Bell:
Well, listen, boys, that has been a fascinating little tiptoe through this wondrous element of our language.

Thank you very much.

That's very, very fun.

And if you have any examples of your favourite eponyms that you'd like to share with us, then please do get in touch, or actually anything that you think we might have got wrong in that episode.

Tom Pellereau:
Very likely.

Rob Bell:
Then get in touch via the email address hello at sketchplanations.com or you can leave us a voice note on the podcast website.

But for now, you can call me a Luddite, but I've had enough of sitting here in my cardigan and staring at this screen for the evening.

I'm off to make myself a massive Caesar salad.

And if I don't finish, that will be fine.

I can always pop it in some Tupperware and stick it in the fridge.

Actually, no, fridge doesn't work.

Thanks for listening.

Until next time, go well, stay well.

Tom Pellereau:
Brilliant.

Rob Bell:
Goodbye.

Jono Hey:
Cheers, everyone.

Rob Bell:
All music on this podcast series is provided by the very talented Franc Cinelli.

And you can find many more tracks at franccinelli.com.