Anonyponymous (13 page)

burnsides; at some point the word did a flip-flop: The switch was probably influenced by “side-hair” and “side-whiskers,” compound terms
sideburns
eventually replaced. Also popular in the U.S. was the word
dundrearies
, after the character Lord Dundreary in
Our American Cousin
, the play Lincoln attended the night he was shot.

a Renaissance man’s Renaissance man: In the credit-where-credit-is-due department, I lifted this from Stephen Jay Gould’s “a Renaissance man of the Renaissance itself,” which is found in an excellent article on Fracastoro and syphilis Gould wrote for
Natural History
(Oct. 2000), and which is the source of most of my information on the subject.

blame it all on the French: Syphilis was widely called “the Spanish disease,” but Fracastoro, for political reasons, hated the French and supported the Spanish, and so wanted to clear the latter’s name and besmirch the former’s.

stealing nectar and ambrosia: Alternate myths have it that Tantalus’s crime was serving the gods human flesh at a banquet, or that he merely told his fellow mortals what the gossip was around the gods’ dinner table.

“Money don’t stink”: What he actually said (reputedly) was
Pecunia non
olet
, which became a standard Latin proverb.

“Jeep!”: The original military vehicles were designated General Purpose, and so
jeep
may just be a clipped form of the initials GP. Still, the popularity of Popeye, the identical spelling, and the fact that four-wheeled jeeps are magical and resourceful creatures themselves all indicate at the very least that Eugene exerted a Hooker-like influence on the name’s popularity. (A similar argument can also be made with Wimpy/wimp, the connection between which is not universally accepted.)

blimp: The origin of the word
blimp
is unknown. The oft-cited etymology crediting it eponymously to Colonel Blimp is definitively apocryphal, the term having predated the cartoon character (who looks suspiciously like Count von Zeppelin).

dummkopf
: Despite its flammability, hydrogen gives better lift than helium and was cheaper; in fact, it was the main gas used in airships before 1921.

montgolfier
in French: Montgolfier was also once a word in English. Similar English-language fossils found in this essay are
roentgen rays
and
judas
in its peephole sense.

Sprudelbad
: The most common term in German is
Whirlpool
, derived from English.

bemelmans
, which means “foreigner who makes fun of natives”: I was shocked when I came across travel writer Tom Miller’s book
The Panama
Hat Trail
and learned this about my grandfather. Miller quotes a Quito bookseller as saying that to carry
El Burro Por Dentro
would be suicidal, even forty years after its publication. To my relief, Miller also reported that certain people, intellectuals mostly, appreciated the book, claiming it spurred change and chalking the negative reception up to knee-jerk nationalism.

a couple of Englishmen and a kid who wrecked his father’s wheels: The brougham was a four-wheel closed carriage, named after Scottish politician Henry Peter Brougham; the hansom a two-wheel closed carriage with the driver sitting at the back, designed by British architect Joseph Aloysius Hansom; and the phaeton a four-wheeled open carriage, named for the son of the sun god who ill-advisedly borrowed his father’s chariot.

a macguffin: A macguffin is the gimmick around which a plot revolves but is in itself meaningless. According to Alfred Hitchcock, who coined the term, “In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers.”

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

JOHN BEMELMANS MARCIANO is the author and illustrator of several children’s books, including
Madeline and the
Cats of Rome
,
Harold’s Tail
, and
Delilah
, as well as the illustrated biography
Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s
Creator
about his grandfather Ludwig Bemelmans. An artist and self-professed word geek, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Andromache, daughter, Galatea, and two cats, Maud and Liddy.