Eponymy in English: English Words Derived from Greek Mythological Figures

What do Theodore Roosevelt (26th US President), Thor (Norse god of thunder), and Genoa (city in Northern Italy) have in common?

They are all eponyms.

Eponyms are personal names (or, as in the case of Genoa, place names) that are used to form new words: The teddy bear derives from the nickname of President Teddy Roosevelt, Thursday is simply Thor's day, and blue jeans are traced back to the phrase "blue of Genoa". Both the personal names and the derived words are called eponyms. The derivation process is eponymy. For eponymous place names there is a special term, toponyms.

Eponymy is an extraordinarily fertile process of lexical derivation. Scores of personal names, both of real people and fictional characters, are the source of everyday words in English. When we call someone a scrooge (< the Dickensian character of Ebenezer Scrooge); when we eat a sandwich (< John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, who popularized this snack); even when we check our e-mail on Yahoo! (< the eponymous race in "Gulliver's Travels")-in all the above cases we have used eponyms.

The following list contains English words derived from Greek mythological figures via eponymy:

The adjective Herculean comes from the Latin name (Hercules) of the Greek mythological hero Heracles. Hercules was a symbol of prodigious strength and brute force. No wonder he became an eponym for superhuman power (as in "Herculean strength") or immense difficulty ("Herculean task").

The trusted friend of Odysseus (Ulysses) and counselor to Odysseus' son Telemachus, good old Mentor, is behind the noun mentor, which signifies an experienced and reliable tutor and guide (hence "mentoring program", mentorship, and mentoree/mentee).

The impossibly handsome, vain, and self-absorbed Narcissus (Greek Narkissos) fell in love with his own reflection in the deep waters of a pool. Unable to tear his gaze away from the object of a passion that could not be consummated, he just sat there staring, day after day, doomed to death by unrequited love. The eponymous flower, narcissus, grew at the site of his death. Other eponyms include narcissist, narcissistic, and narcissism. (Note that a personality disorder akin to extreme narcissism, the Dorian Gray Syndrome, is also an eponym.)

Dr. Sigismund Schlomo Freud had a field day with Oedipus, the mythological king of Thebes who (inadvertently) killed his own father and (just as inadvertently) married his own mother. Oedipus gave his name to the Oedipus complex, which describes a person's intense attachment to the parent of the opposite sex and jealousy of the parent of the same sex. (Although, to be fair, and all phylogenetically determined animalistic sexual instincts aside, poor Oedipus was just fulfilling an oracle.)

Interestingly, there is also a feminine counterpart to the Oedipus complex, named the Electra complex by Carl Jung. (Electra was a mythical Greek princess who avenged the murder of her father by her mother by getting her brother to kill the adulterous mother.)

Procrustes was a murderous bandit who subscribed to the following motto: "As I make my bed, so you must lie in it." You see, Procrustes had an iron bed that he forced hapless passers-by to lie on. Then he secretly adjusted the length of the bed, so that no one could ever fit in. If the person proved too short, Procrustes would stretch him on the rack. If he were too long, Procrustes would cut off his feet. From this abominable practice sprang the eponymous expression a Procrustean bed, which describes an inflexible principle, standard, or policy to which people have to adapt and conform.

Have you ever had to perform a Sisyphean task? A task so repetitive that drove you crazy with boredom and frustration? And just when you thought you'd made some progress, somehow you had to start all over again? You have king Sisyphus to thank for it. Sisyphus was a trickster and a killer who took pleasure in murdering mortals and offending immortals. For his crimes he was punished by the gods with eternal frustration. In the underworld, Sisyphus was forced to push a huge boulder up a steep slope. But as he was a fraction of an inch away from the top, the boulder would roll all the way back down and Sisyphus was back to square one. Again. And again. For all eternity.

The eternal-frustration-as-punishment motif must have sat well with the Olympians because they also applied it to another eponymous miscreant, namely king Tantalus. Tantalus' most notorious crime was to have killed his son Pelops, cooked him, and served him to the gods. Tantalus was condemned to spend an afterlife of interminable desire that could never be satisfied. He stood in cool, sweet water that receded when he bent down to take a drink, beneath a tree that raised its branches when he reached up for its luscious fruit. Next time you find yourself pining for something so excruciatingly out of reach that you have trouble coming up with the right word to describe it, think of Tantalus and the tantalizing food and drink he couldn't get his hands on.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_mythology

http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/europe/greek/articles.html

Merriam-Webster Online: http://www.m-w.com