The Lindy Effect is a good place to restart Eponymy in August. This project originally began in August of 2016 and ran for four straight Augusts until I ran out of steam, got crushed by 2020, and got further crushed in 2021. I had thought about migrating it from Facebook posts to a proper blog for a while, and got motivated to fulfill that idea last year when I moved my personal sites to a new Web host. In doing that migration and adding new content, it’s now gone from a four-year project to a ten-year project with some gaps, and hopefully that means more years to come.
What I mean by that is that the age of this actively maintained project is a proxy measure for how long the project is likely to go on for. This is the principle outlined by the Lindy Effect:
the longer something has existed, the longer it is likely to continue existing from the present.
While applicability to people is limited by the generally fixed maximum lifespan of humans, their creative institutions and artifacts with no inbuilt max age are more likely to last a long time if they have already lasted a long time, while ones which have not reached a certain age are less likely to endure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term in Antifragile, noting that for research and science, new papers are more likely to be refuted or ignored while older ones without successful refutation become widely known and foundational. Taleb was building on the earlier work of Albert Goldman, writing on “Lindy’s Law” for The New Republic in the limited context of comedians appearing on midcentury television. Lindy’s is a deli on Broadway in New York City where Goldman claimed to have observed regular discussion of and from comics appearing on or producing television programs.
Leo “Lindy” Lindemann learned the delicatessen trade in Berlin after the death of his father in 1909. A few years later he emigrated to New York and in around a year moved up the ladder from bus boy to marrying into the family running the restaurant where he worked as a waiter. In 1921 Lindemann opened the first iteration of his iconic deli on Broadway, and gradually started getting regular patronage from the big names working on Broadway. The reach of Lindy’s deli was fueled by its famous cheesecake; the cheesecakes and the deli setting combined for dozens of references in popular culture. The first Lindy’s perished with Lindemann himself in 1957, but a second location up the street persisted until 1969.
In 1979 an unrelated pair of “Lindy’s” delis opened on 7th Avenue after the operators successfully argued that the trademark had fallen into the public domain. The last of these outlets closed in 2018.