Eponyms and Jokes

An eponym is “a person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named.” An example given by Merriam-Webster goes, “Toadfishes burp the songs of their eponyms; one sort of toadfish is called the singing midshipman. —John Hersey, Harper’s, May 1987.”

The now defunct Schott’s Vocab blog offered a few humorous eponyms some years ago.

  1. Bruckheimer: To catastrophically destroy.
  2. Edvard Greed: Norway’s most well-known banker.
  3. Apostrophes: The Greek God of Punctuation.

There are a few more.

In another post, he has a collection of jokes, including this one submitted by Paul.

Harold Camping, the minister who predicted the end of the world on May 21, is a former civil engineer. Which just proves what we always knew: NEVER trust an engineer when he gives you a schedule.

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