Author: Bradley Momberger

Erin McKean is a lexicographer and the founder of the Wordnik online dictionary. She received her AB/AM in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1993 and has been both the Editor-in-Chief and the Chief Consulting Editor of American dictionaries for the Oxford University press. McKean and a small team founded Wordnik in 2008 as…

Richard William “Wil” Wheaton is the wunderkind of a particular branch of sci-fi and nerd culture. Though his first major acting role of note was Gordie in the movie Stand By Me, Wheaton remains best known for playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: the Next Generation. Wheaton left the cast as a regular in 1990…

Today’s edition of Eponymy in August is contextually relevant, as a few days ago I was commiserating with some family members over having had dentists and other medical practitioners who try to upsell services. It might not be expected that physicians and medical professionals in small private practices would need to upsell patients, but it’s…

Today’s edition of Eponymy in August is hopefully a quick one, because I have to get to bed soon and prep for a long drive in the morning. But there are many things to do between now and when I depart. So let’s talk about the Zeigarnik Effect. Bluma Zeigarnik, née Gerstein, was a 20th…

Following on from the first Eponymy in August of the year, here’s another about weird quirks of psychology related to memory and observation.The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (yes, it has its own page; hat tip to the Pacific Standard for that) is also known as the frequency illusion. This phenomenon happens when you hear about something new…

You may have thought that Eponymy in August was over, but really it never went away. It just wasn’t August from 11 months ago until now. But it does lead to a nice segue into talking about today’s Eponymy in August, which is the Mandela Effect. Let’s start by listing some oddly controversial facts. These…

This is the end of August for 2017, and I haven’t gotten to everything I was going to post this year, but it was far from nothing and there is always next year. Anyway, it’s time to leave you again with a useful eponymy that sums up the month we spent together in this context,…

Today’s Eponymy in August is a three-fer, as we will be talking about Holmström’s Theroem. Holmström’s Theorem states that it is impossible to have a system of economic incentives that satisfies all of the following three conditions: The latter two conditions are worth exploring on their own, given that they are also eponymous to their…

The Higgs Boson is also named for God, i.e. the “God particle,” as a compromise between Leon Lederman who called it “the goddamn particle” and his publisher for the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?. Higgs himself is not a fan of this formulation. The existence of…

Ezekiel Bulver is a figment of C.S. Lewis’s imagination, and though the famed author never did write the full biography of Bulver he intended, the backstory of the character was outlined in Lewis’s essay on the topic of Bulverism: “Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose…