What's In a Name, Part 1

“What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” I could have looked it up, but that quote or something close to it comes from the mouth of Juliet as she pines on her balcony and bemoans the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets. Juliet was from whichever family Romeo wasn’t, and loving someone with the wrong name was dangerous, as they would come to find out. (As I said, I could have looked it up, but it’s not really researching words.)

Names and naming things have spawned many words, like eponym and titular, pseudonym, nom de plume and nom de guerre, and sobriquet. We will discuss a few more words for names, like alias and allonym and nom de theatre, but those are just diversionary to our main subject: words for names. (By the way, if you’re looking for a good web site about the etymology of names, try www.behindthename.com.)

I was putting together a powerpoint presentation for my Rotary club’s auction this coming Tuesday, and in putting together the description for one item I wanted to use the word eponymous. Ever-conscious of losing people with when using obscure words, I decided that there would be enough people in Rotary who would be familiar with it that I kept eponym on the slide. We’ll see if it even gets noticed.

The most interesting thing to me about the word eponym is how recent was its entry into English: 1846, according to etymonline.com. It is a pretty straight path from the Greek word eponomous, which comes from epi- (upon) and onyma (name). The word now means to name something after a person (real or fictional). Not always do they need to bear the person’s name (like many airports do: O’Hare, Reagan, Dulles, and Bush come to mind). Modesto is named for an early power broker, a San Francisco banker named William Ralston who was involved in building the Central Pacific Railroad through Modesto. When it was suggested the site be named after Ralston he modestly declined. It was stilled named after him, but described the nature of his response to the eponymous offer: Modesto.

Titular also comes pretty directly to English, but from the Latin word titulus, which means title. When the title of a book or movie is the name of a character (e.g., Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield), the character is known as the titular character. But it can also refer to a title that is bestowed but without much authority, as if to say “in title only”. Some would put some Kings and Queens in this category.

Pseudonym uses the same base word as eponym, onyma. But the pseudo- refers to the Greek word pseudes, which means false. It is commonly used of a name an author uses in place of their own name, but there are two good words (actually, one word and one phrase) for an author’s “pen name.” Pseudonym is appropriately used as a synonym (there’s that –nym again) for alias, which comes from the Latin word alius (other) with the meaning of “at another time”. Alias now has a connotation of criminality that pseudonym doesn’t always have.