A.W.A.D. - Eponyms (10.2007) (Words Coined After Peoples Names)
The US currency notes are printed in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing plants in Washington, DC and Fort Worth, Texas. I visited the Washington DC money factory a few years back and have to say the place feels a bit surreal. You can see sheets of currency notes rolling through by the millions, as if they were the daily newspaper to be read and discarded. Workers move the giant stacks of uncut sheets with forklifts.
No matter how the economy is going, this is one place that always makes money. It's perhaps fitting that it's Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), an inventor and printer, whose picture is printed on the highest denomination currency note in the US.
The name derives from Benjamin Franklin, US statesman, whose portrait adorns the bill.
Benjamin
(BEN-juh-min) noun
Benjamin is a nickname for the US one-hundred-dollar bill.
Maxwellian
(maks-WEL-i-an) adjective
Of or relating to shady business practices, financial tricks, misuse of public funds, etc.
In the US we had Ken Lay and friends from Enron; across the pond in the UK, there was Ian Robert Maxwell (1923-1991). Maxwell was a Czechoslovakian-born British publisher who became notorious for misusing his employees' pension funds of some 400 million pounds.
He also engaged in dubious transactions between his private companies and a public company to prop them up and boost the share prices. For his resilience to rebound after a castigating government report, he earned the nickname the Bouncing Czech.
Cereologist
(seer-ee-OL-uh-jist) noun
One who specializes in investigating crop circles.
Going by the countless varieties of cereals on the supermarket shelves, you'd think you have to be a cereologist to be able to select one. But it's not that. Rather, a cereologist is someone who studies crop circles, intricate circular patterns on crop fields. The word is coined after Ceres, the goddess of agriculture in Roman mythology.
Heath Robinson
(heeth ROB-in-suhn) adjective
Absurdly complex and fancifully impractical. The term was coined after W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944), a British artist known for drawing ingeniously complicated devices.
It's not only mechanical devices that can be Heath Robinsonish. A few years back I came across a book titled "How to Wash Your Face". I'm not kidding--this 256 page tome was authored by a doctor and lists for $25. They say reality is stranger than fiction. The fiction that comes to mind here is a Heath Robinson contraption, or one devised by his US counterpart, Rube Goldberg. Check out their illustrations at http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/heathrobinson and http://www.rubegoldberg.com/
Who knows, those illustrations might make you laugh, resulting in the coffee in your mug getting spilled on the tail of the pet cat on your lap, making the startled kitty jump and hit the ceiling, thus activating the fire-sprinkler and causing it to trigger the fire alarm, making you look up in curiosity, so that your face is splashed with the sprinkler water, thus saving you the $25 cost of the aforementioned book. Who said those devices were useless?
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