A history of the English Language

221.
Common Words from Proper Names.
Another source from which many English words have been derived in the past is the 
names of persons and places. For example, 
sandwich
owes its use to the fact that the earl 
of Sandwich on one occasion put slices of meat between pieces of bread. Like other 
processes of English word derivation this can be well illustrated in the nineteenth century 
and later. Thus we get the word for 
tabasco
sauce from the name of the Tabasco River in 
Mexico. 
Camembert
comes from the village in France from which cheese of this type 
was originally exported. A 
limousine
is so called from the name of a province in France, 
and during the 1920s the American city Charleston gave its name to a dance. The word 
colt
for a certain kind of firearm is merely the name of the inventor. 
Wistaria,
the vine 
whose most common variety is now known as 
wisteria,
is named after Caspar Wistar, an 
American anatomist of the mid-1800s. In 1880 Captain Boycott, the agent of an Irish 
landowner, refused to accept rents at the figure set by the tenants. His life was threatened, 
his servants were forced to leave, and his figure was burnt in effigy. Hence from Ireland 
came the use of the verb 
to boycott,
meaning to coerce a person by refusing to have, and 
preventing others from having, dealings with him. Similarly, 
lynch law
owes its origin to 
Captain William Lynch of Virginia, about 1776, and in the early nineteenth century we 
find the verb 
to lynch
.
 Shrapnel
is from the name of the British general who invented the 
type of missile. More than 500 common words in English have been traced to proper 
names, and they must be con- 
2 
See Louise Pound,
 Blends: Their Relation to English Word Formation
(Heidelberg, 1914) and 
Garland Cannon, “Blends in English Word Formation,” 
Linguistics,
24 (1986), 725–53. 
A history of the english language 288

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sidered as illustrating one of the sources from which new words are still being derived.