Silhouette is an Eponym

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

In 1759, a new head of the treasury was installed in France, and he had this daunting job of trying to rein in a spiraling deficit under the king, Louis XV.

And so he imposed all these austerity measures.

He cut state pensions, he taxed luxury items, including doors and windows, he taxed bachelorhood itself,

and he ended public funding for the king’s gambling losses.

Well, all of this penny-pinching made him really unpopular.

And in fact, when people were doing things on the cheap, they would use his name.

His name was Etienne de Silhouette, and they would say,

I’m doing something à la silhouette, that is, on the cheap, you know, kind of shoddy.

And his name also gave us the word that we have in English for a dark outline of someone

or something against a light background, silhouette.

There was a fashion during that time for making those kinds of portraits of people, just an outline of somebody against a light background.

Because, of course, that’s a whole lot cheaper than trying to hire somebody to paint a painting.

And so his name, Silhouette, became associated with this cheap way of depicting people.

That’s amazing.

I wonder what he would think if he were alive today and knew that his name was still a verb, still a noun, used across languages around the world.

That’s amazing.

I know, isn’t it?

I should add that he only lasted eight months in office.

That’s terrible.

And what time period was he in office?

He entered office in 1759 and didn’t last that long.

That’s super interesting.

So Etienne de Silouette, the man, the administrator, the government official, gave us a word that has not much to do with him, really, right?

Yeah, right.

Just kind of a trend at the time became named after him because it was cheap, right?

Yeah.

So that’s what we call an eponym in the language world.

And I’ll share another eponym later in the show.

We welcome your calls, questions, and comments about language or anything you’ve heard on the show.

Call us 877-929-9673.

That’s toll-free in the U.S. and Canada.

Or send us email to words@waywordradio.org,

or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.