2696: Chads, Karens, and Sadism: a Brief Look at Eponyms May 8, 2024

Eponyms, which is to say words derived from personal names, are actually quite common, and impressively can occupy seemingly any part of speech (or any open lexical class, specifically). There’s adjectives like ‘sadistic’ (from a Marquis de Sade), ‘mesmerize’ (from Franz Anton Mesmer), and especially nouns like ‘nicotine’, ‘boycott’, and ‘diesel’ and ‘cardigan’ and ‘sandwich’ if we again include personal titles. Some other specific surnames, like Einstein are also used as eponyms, though in reference to one, known person. 

These are not only limited to specific, related verbs or nouns. While slang terms like “chad”, “karen” or to a lesser extent “becky” all take a given name for one who represents a certain personality trait or archetype—which is a novel use in some sense—this is not a solely modern practice. Other terms like “john” referring to a man who hires a prostitute, or ‘hick’ (a nickname of Richard) as an unintelligent country dweller, ‘nancy’ for a homosexual man, and so on all do the same thing. ‘Jack’ a nickname of John, may have the most of these terms having brought about the generic nouns from a “car jack” to a “naval jack”, and also the archetypal use when especially historically it denoted a poor person, a laborer and so on. It just speaks to how common of a name Jack and Jacque were that this led to dozens of connotations nowadays.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list, so leave a comment for other personal names that take on eponymous use, particularly any that do not carry negative connotations.