"Putting on the Ritz" and Other Eponyms

The Associative Meaning of Words

Studying the origin of a word adds to its usefulness in the same way that knowing the history of a place adds meaning to its memory.

Before it was a hallowed cemetery, a famous speech, or an epic battlefield, the word Gettysburg referred only to a quiet Pennsylvania town, named for its first English settler, Samuel Gettys, and dating back well before the Revolutionary War.

 Likewise, most American school teachers know that Columbine is a high school in Littleton, Colorado.

Fewer know that the school was named for a small flower in that region. The simpler meaning of the words Gettysburg and Columbine took on unforeseen complexity by events later associated with those words.

Like historic landmarks, many commonly-used words have stories behind them. The fact that such words typically carry their current meaning regardless of whether or not we know their stories is no different, I suppose, than a young school boy thinking Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is where he must have lived before moving to Washington DC.

After a few years with only occasional posts here at Patterns of Ink, I don’t mean to venture back with a professorial series on word association or the origin of words (etymology). In fact, the purpose of this post stems from the post which is to follow. My father-in-law calls putting a twist in a wire fence with a stick, and Oscar Stevens, because a man by that name (who owned the fence beside their farm) used to use that method. I began writing a piece about my father-in-law who yesterday celebrated his 80th birthday, and something in that post triggered these thoughts as a preface of sorts. [That post was never posted.]

The remainder of these thoughts about a tiny etymological category called eponyms, sometimes called “people words.” Eponyms are common words that  come from a person's name. True eponyms are not proper nouns like Gettysburg, even though that geographic name can be traced back to a man named Gettys; eponyms are names  no longer capitalized, like boycott which were once proper names (in this case, Charles Cunningham Boycott) but whose proper use shifted to mean something entirely else. (I realize that placing “entirely” before “else” sounds much more awkward than placing it afterwards and saying “something else entirely," but I will leave it as is for effect.) Because Charles Cunningham Boycott was once the victim of non-violent economic isolation,  more than a hundred years later, such actions are still called boycotts. The word is now used with no need for knowledge of its history and is therefore a true eponym according to the Alpha Dictionary's explanation of eponyms and non-eponyms.

Sometimes eponyms come from the royal title following a person’s name. This is true of the Earl of Sandwich, who fancied eating slices of cold beef between two pieces of bread while playing cards, now such menu items are called sandwiches.

Likewise with cardigan sweaters, “ named after James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, a British Army Major General who led the "Charge of the Light Brigade," immortalized by Tennyson, during the Crimean War. It is modeled after the knitted wool waistcoat that British officers supposedly wore during the war.” This may explain why cardigan sweaters were the manly garments of choice for men’s fraternities and “varsity letter” clubs in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

There was once a man named César Ritz who became famous for his extravagantly decorated and furnished hotels designed to serve the upper echelon of world travelers. His last name soon became so associated with such finery that it became an adjective: ritzy. Much later when Nabisco (the NAtional BIScuit COmpany) patented a new kind of fancy cracker that could be used for hors d'oeuvres and the like, it is no wonder they chose the name Ritz. Whenever we have the desire to live like the rich if only for a night, we’re “Putting on the Ritz.”

That song, written by White Christmas creator Irving Berlin in 1929, has gained popularity through the years with the help of Hollywood’s finest, like Clark Gable and Fred Astaire. Decades later, it was given new life—literally—in Mel Brook’s  Young Frankenstein and its latest cover prompted a flash mob in Moscow, where it sounds like they are not saying "Putting" but  "Putin on the Ritz."


Something tells me that President Ronald Reagan would never have envisioned such a sight just two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall. At this Youtube link you can spend much time watching various covers of  "Putting on the Ritz.". After you've had your fill of this song at the screens and links above, come back to the subject at hand...

If a man named César Ritz had not had such fine taste in hotel interiors or if his name had been  Walter Lebowski, odds are that the hotel chain of that name would not have have become a fancy adjective nor inspired Irving Berlin's song (nor even the cracker).

To the scores of Walter Lebowskis out there who may come upon this post in a Google search, I mean no disrespect to your name. The same would be true of my own name, Tom Kapanka. Ritz sounds ritzy and inspires a song, Lebowski and Kapanka do not. It's that simple. Discussing it further is probably as pointless as saying, "It's a good thing Columbus sailed in 1492, because that year rhymes so nicely with "ocean blue," and how else would we ever remember the date."  Much of language transcends science--even art-- and some things are best left to the mystical realm of the unknown.

This ends our brief lesson on eponyms, which is merely a preface to a single part of a future post

which pays tribute to my father-in-law on his 80th birthday. In the meantime, go put on a cardigan sweater, make a little ham sandwich on a Ritz cracker and watch that Moscow flash mob "Putin on the Ritz" again... unless you wish to boycott it because of Putin's recent controversies in the Snowden matter.