Eponymous should be an unusual word, like haplology or apotropaic, used in a narrow semantic field. Yet it is all over the place, in the press and on the lips of media talkers. Properly, it applies to someone who gives his name to anything, especially, the OED notes, ‘the mythical personages from whose names the names of places or peoples are reputed to be derived’.
In writing that definition, the lexicographer no doubt had in mind the dictionary’s earliest illustrative quotation of the word, from 1846: ‘The eponymous personage from whom the community derive their name.’ That was from the immensely influential History of Greece by George Grote (1794-1871). Just as Grote projected on to religion his dissatisfaction with life at home, which he found ‘disciplined, dreary, and vapid’, in the words of his biographer, he also projected his radical politics on to democratic Athens. In any case he found it necessary to explain the meaning of eponymous in the sentence where he used it, rather defeating the object.
Today, I notice, it is more often than not used the wrong way round: of the thing named rather than the person after whom it is named. So, writing in the Independent about Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Cornwell refers to ‘the eponymous financial media powerhouse’. A piece in the Sunday Telegraph about Yahoo! referred to its ‘eponymous homepage’. Someone in the Daily Telegraph, writing about the chef Rodrigo de la Calle, mentioned ‘his eponymous restaurant in Aranjuez’. (The restaurant, if you are looking for it, is not called Rodrigo, but de la Calle.) In the same paper someone wrote of ‘the eponymous champagne house’ named after the Krug family, and someone else of East Coker and ‘the eponymous poem by T.S. Eliot’, as if the place were named after the poem.
There are dozens of such references each week, and in almost all cases it would do just as well to write ‘of the same name’ or ‘named after him/it’. Why, then, do people use eponymous, especially since they use it catachrestically? I think they must like the sound of it, and have picked it up like the season’s fashion colours. I fear there’s little chance of their stopping.
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