You’ve Been…ed or ized

Have you noticed that a growing number of people no longer simply lose their jobs, their reputations or their arguments?

They become verbs.

This may be a linguistic honor or dishonor of a peculiar kind. Some names are carved in marble; others are conjugated. And once you have been conjugated, there is no appeal. The dictionary does not take your calls. There is no appeals court just the court of public opinion, i.e., the people. Thumbs up or down.

As a wordsmith, albeit no William Safire, I find the habit delightful. As a political pundit and part-time satirist, I find it irresistible, because the news cycle is now minting verbs faster than the US Treasury used to mint pennies.

First, the jargon, so you can impress people at dinner parties.

A verb made from a person’s name is an “eponymous verb” or, if you want to sound tenured and profoundly academic, a “deonymic verb”. Turning a noun into a verb is of course called verbing, more formally conversion, or, my favorite, anthimeria, which sounds like a Greek island where words go to retire or at least vacation.

Now, the hall of fame.

Captain Charles Boycott was an Irish land agent who, around 1880, so annoyed his tenants that the whole community refused to have anything to do with him. Nobody would harvest his crops or deliver his mail. He achieved the rare feat of being ignored so thoroughly that the entire world now remembers him.

Thomas Bowdler published a “family-friendly” Shakespeare, removing anything that might make a Victorian maiden blush, which is to say a good deal, even most of Shakespearean fare. He was literate, but not quite literati. To bowdlerize is now to sand the edges off anything worth reading.

Luigi Galvani made dead frog legs twitch with electricity and gave us galvanize, a word now used chiefly in meaningless corporate mission statements, many of which get laminated.

Louis Pasteur heated milk and saved millions of lives; his reward is appearing on every carton in your refrigerator, and we gladly thank him for the process.

Franz Mesmer put audiences into a trance, and his name has held ours ever since.

Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, in 1812, signed off on an electoral district so contorted a cartoonist said it resembled a salamander. Gerry plus salamander gave us gerrymander. Two centuries later, both parties practice the art with an enthusiasm that would embarrass the salamander. (Pedants note: Gerry pronounced it with a hard G. Nobody else does. Become a verb and you lose control of the pronunciation, too.)

Ernesto Miranda gave us Mirandize, performed nightly on every police procedural on television. If the cops forget to do it, you, well the baddies, are off Scott free.

Charlie Ponzi, circa 1920, lured investors into his fraudulent scheme by misleading them with profits from more recent investors. The ultimate con man lent his name to all such activities ever since, and a new one is seemingly invented every week.

Humphrey Bogart, thanks to that dangling cigarette, gave us bogart, meaning to hog what ought to be passed around.

And in Britain did you know, one does not vacuum the carpet; one hoovers it, a tribute to W.H. Hoover that any marketing department would kill for.

My personal favorite is Horace Fletcher, the diet faddist who preached chewing every bite until it surrendered, 32 times by popular legend. To Fletcherize was briefly all the rage. Fletcher has faded; the dinner-table lecture has not.

Washington, naturally, keeps its own glossary.

Robert Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court nomination went down so spectacularly that to bork now means to torpedo a nominee by any means available. His admirers call it the original sin of the modern confirmation wars; his detractors call it Tuesday.

Bill Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with that woman, one Monica, and since then to get Clintoned was not considered, as it was oral, at least by teenage boys, to have sex.

Which brings us to the fresh nouveauté crop.

In 2017, recall Anthony Scaramucci became White House communications director and lasted about eleven days and ten minutes, undone by a phone call with a reporter that no newspaper could print uncensored, it was so foul mouthed. For years, “a Scaramucci” was Washington’s unit of measure for brevity. To be Scaramucci’d is to flame out before the business cards arrive.

That record stood until this month. Katie Zacharia was named White House press secretary, held a single fourteen-minute briefing, took three brief questions, and was out after five days, amid headlines about whether she had been presented as a lawyer despite never passing the bar. She lasted half a Scaramucci.

To be Zacharia’d is to discover that your résumé reached the podium before you did.

The same week, Kimberly Guilfoyle, a dated Fox television host, former fiancée of the President’s eldest son and wife to Gavin Newscum, and now former ambassador to Greece, resigned at the White House’s firm request after reports alleging, among other things, that she demanded a donor to cover a six-figure credit card bill. She denies it and vows to defend her honor and good name. Fair enough, but the verb may get there first. To be Guilfoyled is to arrive in Athens on the cover of Vogue and leave on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, in disgrace.

Notice the mechanics. Most of these verbs take -ize, English’s all-purpose verb factory. Others, like boycott and bork, simply walk into the sentence and start working, no paperwork required.

So, what is the consequence of all this?

Simply this: you do not get to choose your own verb or reputation.

Pasteur earned his for saving lives. Boycott got his for being insufferable. Bowdler wanted to be remembered as a guardian of virtue and is remembered instead as a man with scissors. History is not a sculptor; it is a copy editor, and it often has a mean streak.

The lesson for anyone in public life is plain. Behave as if your surname is about to enter the dictionary, because in our American towns and most other capitals it just might. Behave well and you may become a noun of at least modest character and some honor. Behave badly and you will become a verb, conjugated forever by people who never met you. As for me, I would happily be Mallochized. I’m just not sure yet what it would mean, and I am in no hurry to find out. Although at one point in 1992, Lady Margeret Thatcher called me a “Global Sherpa” and The Independent, a UK newspaper, ran my color photo with the title: Most Feared Man in Europe. And yes, I was and remain the only American to have been made persona non grata by the demeaned European Union for malevolent crimes suggesting that that body was less than virtuous.