From a Dunce to a Ferris Wheel

Any English word of more than three syllables - especially those derived from Latin or Greek, as so many are - can act as tripwires to the writer, or indeed to the speaker. I have just come across an instance in a story in Jeffrey Archer's Twelve Red Herrings.

In an effort, perhaps, to make his text sparkle a little, Archer writes, in connection with J B Priestley's play An Inspector Calls, "the eponymous inspector was staring into a house into which an Edwardian family were preparing for a dinner . . ." What Archer obviously means is that the Inspector referred to anonymously in the play's title was staring into a house.

But the term 'eponymous' refers either to something named after a person or place (such as a 'Ferris wheel' - named after an American engineer); or to someone who has given (?lent) his or her name to something, such as Duns Scotus, the 13th century scholar after whom a stupid person may be called a 'dunce'. It's all to do with naming, and the Inspector is not actually named either in the title of Priestley's play, or in Archer's allusion to it.

Buckingham Palace, Platonic mariage, the Maginot Line and the Davy lamp may all be termed 'eponymous'; and so, in certain contexts, may Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Margaret Thatcher, Samuel Morse and the Bible's anti-heroine Jezebel.

From a Dunce to a Ferris Wheel