Names made into words
A friend of mine brought to my attention a very interesting phenomenon the other day, which is the large number of words that are derived from a person’s name. A word that has a person’s name as its root is known as an eponym.
My friend told me one of the surprising eponyms he came across was the word “galvanize.” The word means “to stimulate or shock with an electric current.” It is also employed in more figurative uses such as “to arouse awareness” or “spur.”
The word comes from an Italian biologist named Luigi Galvani, who lived in the 18th century. Galvani became famous for demonstrating how an electrical current caused muscles to twitch.
Electricity was still somewhat of a mystery in Galvani’s time, and Galvani was the first to show that animal bodies used a kind of electricity to control muscles. Previously, nerves were thought to carry water which moved the muscles, but Galvani showed that nerves were better thought of as electrical conductors.
One of my favorite eponyms is “Pythagorean” as in the “Pythagorean Theorem,” named after the Greek mathematician, Pythagoras. The Pythagorean Theorem is one of the first theorems that students learn in math class, which is how to find the area of the sides in a right triangle, written as a2 + b2 = c2 where the side represented by “c” is the hypotenuse.
Another good eponym, maybe even better than Pythagorean, is Cartesian. If Pythagorean pertains to Pythagoras, then Cartesian must pertain to someone with a name like Carter, right? Not exactly. Cartesian pertains to a French philosopher named René Descartes, who lived in the early 17th century. What’s interesting about this eponym is that the “s” is pronounced in Cartesian but neither “s” is pronounced in Descartes, so the name is pronounced as “day cart.”
Descartes is among the most famous philosophers of all time, known for creating a coordinate system in mathematics whereby a point in two-dimensional space could be expressed as a set of numbers, and that even whole shapes could be expressed as an equation.
Another of Descartes’ lasting ideas, and one that bears his name, is Cartesian dualism. Cartesian dualism is the belief that the mind and the body are two distinct entities. Descartes believed that the mind (or soul) was not made of matter and that it merely inhabited the body temporarily, allowing for the soul to persist after the body’s death. This was in opposition to materialists who believed that all that exists is made of matter and that the soul Descartes described does not exist.