Bradley Momberger, Chief Eponymist
I’m not a professional on the topic, and sadly not an academic. I am, however, a software engineer by day and a nerd about many things by night.
Language is one of those things. My fascination with eponymy flows naturally from wanting to know how language works, how it’s constructed, how it deals with issues like ambiguity, how it expands over time, etc.
My fascination with eponymy in language
I remember being in my first full time job as a software developer, probably 2003 before the Internet became five websites, each one full of screenshots of the other four. I was also in grad school and this would have been two years before I transformed into the fun social butterfly I was until 2020 happened. With a lot of time on my hands, I spent my hours sitting in my tiny apartment bedroom playing PC games, moderating the SportsByBrooks forums, and reading FARK and Slashdot.
I happened upon Roger Boyle’s page of eponymy in computer science from when he was a professor at Leeds, and was delighted with all the new terms and ideas it presented me.
There were early Internet cultural phenomena like Abigailisms and Warnock’s Dilemma. There was hard computer science in Bernstein’s Conditions and RSA. There was Stigler’s Law of Eponymy, which is a foundational concept in this field and very important to keep in mind. There was the wildcard stuff that slipped between the fabric of different spheres, like Zawinski’s Law and Duff’s Device. This all made me want to find more and more of these examples in language, but it would be more than a decade before I began to organize this knowledge in any formal way.
Things started changing for me in the early 2010s. I developed programming skills and took a lot of inspiration from people I saw making Internet art. I wanted to create things like I was seeing.
When you get to this point in your life, try a little bit of everything. In my case, I made Twitter bots, simple Web tools, artsy image generators, and more. But I still wanted to write prose.
By 2016, I had seen several friends participate in the daily gratitude challenge in previous Novembers, and it always seemed to taper off for them by the first two weeks. I had even tried NaNoWriMo once, but did not succeed in even getting the book going. I felt like I had something to say if I let myself set the parameters for my own writing project. I got a break in August 2016 because my family had to take two weeks of vacation instead of the usual one, and that freed up some time from my usual life. I lined up topics that were relevantt to my interests, and posted something every day for the entire month. Looking back on them, they got much better in quality quickly, and that helped to motivate continuing the project in a reduced capacity for the next few years.
After 2019, things started to change again. The social distancing of 2020 got a lot of people interested in new projects at home but I was mostly invested in my job and playing Rocket League. I was in a horrible accident in 2021 just before August, and my brains were pretty scrambled from trauma surgery and five days in the hospital, then later in the year I lost my sister and found myself having to do home maintenance and projects on my own. That’s carried through to today, but I’ve lately felt the push to take on something new.