99% Invisible - 245- The Eponymist

Episode Date: February 1, 2017

Eponym (noun):  A person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named; a name or noun formed after a person. An eponym, almost by definition, has some kind of story behind it — some reason it … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Helen Zoltzmann's The Illusionist is a show about language and words. That's kind of like saying that this show is about architecture and design. The description doesn't quite capture the way we use those lenses to view the world at large. My favorite words are eponyms. If you don't know what an epinem is, you are about to find out. Because I love epinems so much, each year Helen produces an episode of the illusionist about epinems, which feature me talking a little bit. And we put two of those episodes together for you to enjoy. One quick note, Helen is from the UK, where

they often refer to ballpoint pens as byros. You would have picked that up through contacts, but I just wanted to eliminate that half-second of confusion that you might have if you're not from there. All right, without further ado, here's Helen's ultimates, the illusionist. A while ago, Roman tweeted the following, I would totally listen to an ongoing radio series comprised solely of the stories behind eponyms. Firstly, I thought, what's an eponym? Eponym, now, a word or name derived from the name of a person, or a person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc. is named. Secondly, I wondered what it was about eponyms that got Roman so excited. An eponym, just almost by definition, has some kind of story, even if it isn't the origin

story, it has something where it got the eponym attached to it, which is a good enough story to be retold. And so for that reason, I just kind of love them and it sort of starts a good conversation, I think. That's what I love about eponyms. I've always liked silhouette because I think it's a little bit of a slur if I have this right. The idea, like, really elaborate painting portraiture was in fashion. Silhouette was the head of the French treasury, was cutting back into their version of austerity.

That's right at the time when outline drawings were becoming in fashion, which are clearly not as elaborate, didn't require an artist, and require months of time. And so that type of a portrait was a la silhouette, like a really like stripped down, simple, didn't require or a skill.

And I love that, because it's a bit of a slight at the same time as being descriptive. And so I love those ones like that. Well, if you like silhouette Roman, you're probably going to love Baudlerisation after the English editor Thomas Baudler, who in 1818 released a version of Shakespeare's plays that he'd reworked to make them more suitable for women and children, as in, he'd taken out all of the naughty bits and foul language. So, Lady Macbeth doesn't even say her famous line, out, out, damn spot anymore, but out, crimson spot, as if she's in a laundry

detergent advert. To be fair, Badel is addition was actually a huge success and brought Shakespeare to a much wider audience, but his name does now stand for CAC-handed explication. When it comes to word origins, an F&M is the surest bet that you're going to get a good story out of it. That's what I love about them. And it's taken me this long to realize. I know. What is your problem?

I told you from the very beginning, it should just be an F&M show. Yeah. I love them. So you should start. Do one. Do a regular one every six weeks. Just do an F&M. Oh, I'll see. I'll see how I love them. So you should start, do one, do a regular one every six weeks, do an ebb and an. I'll see. I'll see how this one goes. Yeah. I'm going to start small with some

eponymous items you're probably all familiar with. You might be holding one right now, the BIC and the BIRO. I chose these for the first epinim's attempt because I thought they're in the spirit of both Roman show 99% invisible, which examines a lot of commonplace objects, and of this one, because this is a show about words, and what is stationary without words, and words without stationary. Stationery is the physical infrastructure of words. That is James Ward, author of Adventures in Stationery, a journey through your pencil case. So James knows a lot about ballpoint pens, which we might casually refer to as

byros or bicks. I guess what's kind of interesting is that for lots of people they're just one thing. So people say a big byroe. And is that controversial? It's kind of odd in the same way as you, I mean, you wouldn't say I'm going to have a can of Pepsi Coke or I suppose you might say I just bought a new Dyson Hoover, which is, I guess it's when one brand or name becomes the generic and the other one remains the specific. How do you think Biro managed to become the generic?

Lazzlo Biro, he, I mean, he didn't invent the ballpoint, but he kind of perfected it. The invention of the ballpoint going by a patent filed in 1888 is credited to John J. Loud, who had a great name for a product, but not a good pen, which left room for Lazlo Biro to swoop in and claim ballpoint victory. Born in Budapest in 1899, Lazlo Barrow had been variously, a medical student, a stage hypnotist and insurance salesman, a race car driver, and eventually he became a journalist, which was what he was working as in the early 1930s, when he invented the pen that would make his name, and indeed take his name. And apparently when they were here in the print room and the heat of the machinery caused his fountain pen

to leak. And so he wanted to develop an alternative way of creating a pen that didn't leak due to the heat and pressure. And he saw the way that the cylindrical print presses rolled the ink onto the page. And so he thought, oh, if only you could have like a miniature version of those,

but the problem is that a cylinder can only roll in forwards and backwards, whereas when you're writing it needs to roll in all directions. And the story there is almost certainly not true, but is frequently told is he was sitting in a cafe looking out of the window trying to make sense of how you'd make a cylinder roll in all directions. And it had been raining outside and there's some kids playing with marbles and one of them rolled marbles through a puddle and then he saw the line of water that the marble made on the pavement and then he suddenly realized, oh well, a ball rolls in all directions. That seems quite obvious that a ball rolls in all directions. I mean, that seems quite obvious that a ball rolls in all directions.

Like all ball games are based on that principle, but it took him, these children playing with marbles for him to make the connection. And he had like this weird experience. I think he was like checking into a hotel and he signed in using his prototype pen and the guy next to him kind of saw the pen and was like, oh, that's rather interesting. Tell me about your pen. It's not the best pickup line, but that passing pen enthusiast turns out to be the former president of Argentina visiting Europe

to promote trade links. So in due course, Lazló Bairó moved to Argentina to grow his pen empire. Penpire? These kind of stories that they had these prototype pens and they take them to meetings to try and get investors. And Lazló would be doing all of the talking and his colleague would be under the table, he'd be like, because some of the pens worked and some of the pens didn't. And so he'd get out a little scrap of paper and he'd be sort of scribbling on a bit of paper to try and get the pen to work. And if it started working, then he'd go, oh, and here's a sample. Whereas if it didn't start working, then he'd give him a signal. And as I'd be like,

unfortunately, we don't have any prototypes with us, but welcome, next time we come. So, ByRose were a bit rubbish. They had lots of problems that they had to resolve. They had to find an ink that was viscous enough that it wouldn't leak out, but then not so thick that it would clog or jam. They had to find a way that you could keep it in like a jacket pocket and it wouldn't overheat

and make the pen leak. So once they cracked it, then other people were able to come along and go, oh, this is great. So Pyro teams up with Henry Martin, who was involved in like the aeronautics industry in the UK, because he needed, in order to make the pen, he needed ball bearings, or very, very fine ball bearings and aviation industry makes the best ball bearings. And then, I mean, this is during the Second World War at this point, but they started manufacturing these ball point pens and they gave them to the RAF

because if you're flying really high and you need to write down a coordinates or whatever, you won't depend that's not going to leak because of the air pressure. And these pens worked. Who Ray, but it wasn't all smooth rolling thence fourth. There was a lot of competition, albeit mostly rubbish. In the United States, a man called Milton Reynolds wanted to be the first to launch a ballpoint in that country. Yeah, the Reynolds International, and it was described as this kind of atomic age, super pen. He didn't actually put in much effort to make the super pen a super pen.

He just wanted to be the first to market, so everyone bought his pen. He was a kind of opportunistic, uh, Huxster. He kind of just rushed out this, this pen, which caused like a sensation at the time. It went at first launched first launched in New York, there were just crowds like thousands of people lining the streets. Is it like a Pennsylvania for pens? Yeah, or you know, when there's like a new iPhone or something,

it was like that, but for pens, it was crappy. And it came with a guarantee that if it broke within two years, then they'd replace it and they'd just have to replace hundreds of thousands of these things. In the US, that created the market for the ballpoint, but it also then nearly killed it off because people had this terrible experience of these bad, bad pens. But then another major ballpoint player entered the fray, a manufacturer of fountain pens who kept getting enquiries for ballpoint pen parts, Marcel Bick, spelt B-I-C-H. But for his eponymous pen, he dropped the H so that you wouldn't think

the Bick crystal was pronounced Bick or Bitch or any other way than Bick. This was after the war that the Bick came along and they licensed the technology from Biro. There were these very complicated legal battles where each party kept suing the other one because they claimed an infringement and Miles Martin, which was the UK company that Byro was involved with. They were suing BIC and there was all of these complications

and then sort of with Richard Curtis for a romantic comedy inevitability. Henry Martin, who ran Miles Martin at company and his son married the daughter of Marcel Bick. So it's real Romeo and Juliet stuff. Yeah, but you can imagine that it must have been tricky when they're choosing which pen to sign the marriage certificate with. Maybe they just went for a pencil. Yeah, Bick grew and grew and grew. And how did they manage that? Because that particular pen, the big crystal, the one that everyone refers to, has the big

biro with its hexagonal body and it's familiar cap with the hole in the end. And that particular pen just works. So it's meritocracy. So yeah, exactly. And it's something like, I think half of all ballpoint pens that's holding the world every day are bit crystals. So if you think how many other millions of types of ballpoints that there are, like there's supermarket or own brand versions.

I've got this one I stole from a hotel. Yeah, there's the same to show it to you. The hotel, the bit crystal just works and it's, there's the... It's a shame to show it to you. It's stolen hotel, the big crystal just works and it's... There's one in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I don't know if it's necessarily always on display, but they've got it in their collection somewhere. You have to ask. Yeah, you have to book a head.

You have to pay $20 to see a pen that you could buy for $0.50. Yeah, but it's a different experience. Let's take a little etymology break. Pen and pencil may share a syllable, but don't let that GPU into thinking they have a common linguistic origin. Pen derives from the Latin penna, which meant feather. So saying quill pen is a topology good to know.

Pencil, meanwhile, came from the Latin for a painter's brush. Penna's sillis, a diminutive of peniculus, which meant little tail, and the Latin for tail is also where we get the word penis. Anyway, back to pens and how their development influenced the development of writing itself. The ability to make marks more precisely means that you're able to make more complex marks. So if all you have is a bit of stick and a clay tablet, you can only produce quite basic scripts, so like you know, form is quite angular. And but then if you start using like a read brush

on a pirus, that offers you more flexibility. And then if you start using instead of a pirus which is quite rough if you use parchment on a vellum which is extremely smooth and you use a quill which is very flexible then you're able to produce extremely beautiful like illustrated texts or illuminated texts and so with those developments it means that the characters that you're able to produce are it more easy to distinguish. So you're able to have more characters

until you're able to produce writing, which is more complex, I suppose. My school would only let us use fountain pens. We were not allowed to write with ball points. And this seems to have been quite a common attitude towards ball points for a long time. A fountain pen can produce thick lines, thin lines, flourishes, and thus invest your handwriting with a lot of character and flair.

But the ball in a ball point produces a line of uniform thickness. So a lot of people believe that the pens were detrimental to handwriting. Laslos' daughter, she said, her father would often respond to these complaints. And he used to hear people say that the ballpoint was ruining writing skills, and he'd smile and say, well, writing comes from the heart if we can help the hand to perform the task, what it's so wrong with that. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. Well done, let's say, Byro. I think it's interesting, but their names are on products that are extremely successful,

but also disposable. their names are on products that are extremely successful, but also disposable. Yeah, and also they are kind of disposable in that you can know what a big is or you can know what a biro is, but you don't need to know who Marcel is or who Lazlo is. So they've kind of made this disposable contribution to history

and in the same way they've made themselves disposable. So, if your eponymous product is successful, your involvement in it and even your own identity is subsumed, which might not sit that well with the kind of people who put their names on things, because calling something after yourself seems like quite an ego-miniical choice to me. I mean, I may be wrong,

but my impression is a lot of epinems are not the person naming them after themselves. It's more of an assigned by another person. It's like a mark of respect. Yeah. Do you think that people who've got a disease or horrible medical condition named after them? That's quite a sad way to be remembered, isn't it? I don't know. It depends because if you're a researcher, you've probably gotten past the feeling of grossness around disease and you probably just enjoy the fact that you were instrumental in its discovery or successful treatment. So I have a feeling that I could even live with a horrible disease being named after me. Yeah, but then you'd have people who only remember you because you're what killed their grandma.

And you feel good about that. Yeah. Just be remembered. I think that's the most important thing it doesn't matter what it's for. That's what serial killers are banking on. Yeah. And now part two of the illusionist Epinim's saga, where we learn some bad news about Epinim's.

There's a shift, a gradual shift away from using Epinim's in medicine. Who's this enemy of Epinim's? My name's Isaac Siemens, and I'm a resident physician in the department of family and community medicine at the University of Toronto. There's two camps in medicine currently, people who want to use eponyms and people who want to move away from eponyms and there's there's a few different reasons for that. People that are more in touch with history perhaps and then people that are more moving towards kind of accuracy in language, in broad strokes, that's the controversy. You can see the practical case for this shift.

Medical workers have to stay abreast of an awful lot of terminology. You try memorizing a load of surnames in which alemen teach one represents. A list of diseases with somebody's last name as the title gives you no information and you can kind of get bungled up. Whereas you can kind of fake your way through, if you will, if the name of the disease says something about the disease itself. To use an example that was all over the news when I was growing up, CJD, Croixfelt Jacob disease, the name alone doesn't tell you much about what it is, unless you're familiar with the early 20th century work of the German neurologist Hans Gerhard Kreuzfeldt and Alfonz

Maria Jakob. The eponym is also not easy to spell. At the far end of the scale, tabloids call the condition the human form of mad cow disease, a rather cartoonish term for a brutal and incurable illness, so the other option is the scientific term. CJD is a form of transmissible spongiform encephalitis. Encephalitis from the medical Latin encephalon from the ancient Greek encephalos, meaning brain, the itus suffix denotes inflammation. Spongiform encephalitis, to me that would be easier because that tells you something about, I mean, although it's Latin, it gives you a bit of information so you could kind of piece it together if you

had to. Yeah, well, spongy. Yes, spongy turns your brain to sponge, essentially. So it's all there. If anything, that's more literal than a lot of disease names would be. Yeah, I think so. Perhaps when you're receiving a diagnosis, there's some psychological protection from the grim reality of what's happening in your body being somewhat disguised by science-speak or the

opaceness of an eponym. On the other hand, an overly academic or incomprehensible description of the condition can amplify a patient's stress and fear. One thing that hopefully is changing in medicine that may be ties in with this whole issue is the sort of black boxing of knowledge and the sort of protective nature of different professions. And I think it's similar to law or engineering maybe where, you know, in order to protect our jobs and to seem like we have some sort of power over the people we work with, we kind of make things possibly more difficult to understand than they need to be. And we use a jargon and a language that needs to be taught to be understood. So I don't know if there's some sort of like unconscious protectionism of our practice involved

with naming of diseases and like, because the non-epinem names are very like complicated and don't mean a lot to people. It's it's quite a common thing in language like the Bible using quite lofty sounding language so that you maintain that division of status. But I just wonder whether there's a decent middle ground in medicine between wibbly wobbly heart disease and a long complicated name. Yeah, you don't want it so simple that you sound kind of stupid or like you don't know what's going on when you when you say it, I guess, but it's also in medicine as in everything communication is so important. And so you want to strike that middle ground where you're making sense to the

person who it's most important to, which is the patience. So in some circumstances, it's better to use the eponym because it might be more familiar. We learn about Trisomy 21, which is a genetic disorder that we're encouraged to speak about referring to the actual genetic issue, whereas Down syndrome is the common eponym. I think the lay public as well are more familiar with that language. Some concepts are really hard to describe without the eponym, and with an eponym, much more memorable. With the Heinlec maneuver, be something that people knew if it wasn't attached to a name,

like, I'm like, you know, no, I don't think so. Would it have made the news in May of this year when 96-year-old Dr. Henry Heimlich himself saved a woman from choking on a piece of hamburger meat by using the maneuver that bears his name? So I still like them in these ways that they help tell an interesting story, but I totally get why then. I'm not so tied to my worldview or nostalgia that I cannot accept that it would be better another way.

Well, good, because there are certainly some aspects to eponyms that I don't think you'd like, Roman. A lot of the argument against eponyms is that it's sort of a simplification of complex stories where generally a white dead male will get the eponym. But if you look at the process of discovering and categorizing diseases, it's often over the course of more than a lifetime, and it involves many, many people. It's a false history to just use this name. Then there are ridiculous extremes where there's like four or five

people that all have a similar form of the disease named after them. And then later on they discover that it was the same disease the whole time. And then it gets all messed up. Like I have one of them written down because I can never remember it. But I think it's the longest, it's the longest eponym that I've come across. And it's a four-barreled name, if you will. And it's Mayor Rocketansky Custer Howeser Syndrome. Mayor Rocketansky Custer Howeser Syndrome is congenital abnormalities in or absence of the uterus and vagina.

It sounds like four people all had some sort of a claim to the discovery of the disease. In reality, there were far more than four. People have been writing about the condition all the way back as far as the Greek physician Hippocrates in the fifth century BC. Mayor Rocketansky, Kuster and Halzer all made significant contributions

to the understanding of the disease, but they weren't even working together. Mayor described the syndrome in a paper in 1829. That's 50 years before Kusta was born, 92 years before the birth of Hauser, who went on to name the disease Mayor Rockitansky Kusta syndrome. Someone else added Hauser to the end. You don't hear that disease name a lot,

but I feel like every time I hear it, the order is a little different, so I don't even know if there's, like, a standardized name order to it. Maybe they shuffle it so that everyone gets turned at the front. Yeah, they take turns. The problem with quite a lot of epinons is the person named they're in. Writer syndrome is a condition where you get joint pain related to a kind of systemic inflammation, and it's named after Hans Ritter, who was a famous Nazi war criminal who did terrible experiments on inmates at Buchenwald.

Hans Ritter discovered the eponymous syndrome in 1916 when he treated a soldier during the First World War, prior to his Nazi affiliations, of which the American rheumatologist Dr. Ephraim Engelman was unaware when he coined the eponym in 1942, but he later joined the campaign which began in 1977 to replace the eponym with a name that doesn't honor somebody associated with war crimes and mass murder. If you don't want to evoke handswriter, you can call this condition reactive arthritis. But while usage of the eponymous term has decreased, it is still being used in medical schools and in journals. The debate raises on, do you pick and choose which parts of history are marked? Or do you allow a person's scientific achievements to be honored, despite whatever horrible things

they did? Controversial things, eponyms. There's even more controversy about eponyms where there's like a sub-conflict, if you will, going on about whether to use the possessive or not in epinems. So, there's even within people that use epinems or don't. The people that use epinems are having debates about whether it should be downs apostrophe S for possessive or down syndrome. And there's research about like which should be used in medical journals to simplify searches so that you don't have to search both terms.

I think that's the one thing I would simplify. I would get rid of all apostrophes. Wow. That seems like the right solution. C's a salad. It's not C's a salad. C's a nose. But yeah, the apostrophes, it messes it up a little too much, and you shouldn't have to think about it. There's already enough to think about. Yeah, you need to worry about the horrible disease you've got. Exactly. That you've got to cure.

And the great rich story behind the name. Yeah, there's two things. That's enough. It's enough to juggle. Something to keep you occupied in the waiting room, isn't it? Exactly. And eponym just does have so much story embedded in it. In fact, last night I was eating dinner with my kids

and my wife. And we were talking about childbirth and mentioned the Caesarian section, the way that these two babies, you know, my twin boys came into this world. And it caused us to talk about Caesar and was Caesar really the first person to be the result of a cesarean section in which case I I have no actual knowledge of this but I said probably not it's

hard to imagine that the first person to be born through this procedure also became one of the most famous people in all of history. And invented one of the most famous salads. See, F&M searches like they're endlessly fascinating. So, but it causes great conversation at a dinner table with two nine year olds and my wife. And we had fun talking about it. And even the parts of it that are the, you know, the caveats. And generally the etymology with the tidesc story is the least true, you know, it's just like that's the nature of it.

Unfortunately, they're shaggy and messier than they, in general, the true ones are shaggy or messier. You have some gory, dinner table conversation. It was getting on the edge there. I mean, if you're talking messy, good grief. The Illusionist is produced by Helen Salzman with music by Martin Ostwick. Find it at theillusionist.org that's illusionist with an A, not an I. It was the first show created specifically for radio topia and I could not love it more. Subscribe now and then we can all talk about it on Twitter together. 99% Invisible Is Delaney Hall, Sheree Fusev, Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sam Greenspan,

and me Roman Mars. Katie Mingle is our senior editor, Kurt Colstead is our digital director and Terran Mazza, is the Baroness. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Org. We're on Instagram and Tumblr too.

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