You're listening to Part Time Genius, a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Guess what Mango?
What's that? Will?
So I was doing some research for this week's episode. First of all, are you proud of me? I did some research for this week's episode like that?
Uh huh?
And I was looking up spoonerisms. Now you know what spoonerisms are, right, Yeah.
They're like funny mixed up phrases.
Yeah, it's like when the beginning of words are confused. So if you accidentally say I hit my bunny phone instead of I hit my funny bone or something like that, that's the spoonerism. But I had no idea that the phrases are actually linked back to a real person. Like this guy's name was Spooner. It was this lecture at Oxford. He was also a deacon, and he was named William
Archibald Spooner. Now, apparently Spooner was a very sweet and bright man, but a very nervous lecturer, and he would end up standing in front of the church and saying all sorts of these spoonerisms, like the Lord is a shoving leopard.
Do you know what that one?
Would be a spoonerism for loving shepherd.
That's exactly right.
And apparently he once gave a toast to the Queer Old Dean when he actually, of course meant dear old Queen. It's an unfortunate stumble there, but for whatever reason, the memory of his gaffes have persisted, and despite living a full life, the only thing he's remembered for are these
linguistic fumbles. But reading about Spooner made me think of all the other common words that you might not know or actually named for real people, like Nacho's named after a chef called Ignacio or Dunce, which was this Scottish philosopher whose theories were later ridiculed. And I know you've researched a whole bunch of these, so I feel like we should dive in.
Yeah I did research too, but maybe, in the words of William Archibald Spooner himself, let's get this stow sharded.
You've been saying that went up, Well done. Hey there, podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm here with my good friend Mangesh hot Ticketter and sitting behind that big booth just relaxing to the max, and he's wearing big sunglasses, he's got a beach hat on, he's got this big.
Fan playing and little hair blowing in the wind. He's got his feet kicked up on the desk, and he's drinking. I think that's a pinaclet. If I'm not mistaken, that is our good friend Dylan. Now, Mango, do you know why he's looking like vacation Dylan over there? He does know he's supposed to be recording this episode, right.
He told me he's trying to prove that he's so relaxed so that we'll start using his name as an eponym. I think he wants to turn Dylan into a verb for being ultra chill, Like, how are you doing this week? Oh, I'm straight dylaning over here?
Okay, yeah, I don't know if I'm seeing that one take off, but mercy.
Yeah, that's why I told him to like stop trying to make Dylan happen Dylan. Uh. But by that point he'd already bought a beach chair and covered the studio florenceand and.
Whatever he got to commit.
But how about we get started on our list of epinems with someone who is the total opposite of Dylan. A man who is the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, who also did all the wrong things. A man named Charles Cunningham Boycott, who of course give us the word boycott.
That's a fun one, all right. Well, tell me a little bit about mister Boycott.
Yeah. Charlie Boycott, or Chaz as I call him, was a retired British Army officer who moved to Ireland in the late eighteen hundreds to become a land agent. And if you don't know, a land agent is basically like a property manager, but kind of an enforcer for landowners. So he was in charge of forcing tenant farmers to pay rent and evicting them when they didn't, which is obviously a very unpopular job. But to add to all that,
his timing was not great. He got into the gig right around the time of rising Irish nationalism and at a time when tenant farmers had started to organize into something called the Land League. And at the time the farmers were tired of being exploited and it had come
to a head. So farmers wanted fair rent. They also wanted some sense of stability, like They didn't want to be kicked off the land if they had paid their rent on time, and they wanted to be able to sell their opportunity to work the land to other tenant farmers without any sort of interference for the landlords. You know, all things that feel pretty fair. But in eighteen eighty, when Boycott decided to evict eleven tenant farmers, things really
hit the fan. The Land League encouraged anyone working for Boycott to stop working for him, and they froze him out of the community in this big way, with shops refusing to serve.
Him, so they basically boycotted him.
Yeah, they also gave him the silent treatment by not talking to him, which you know, maybe would have blown over eventually. But the reason we know all about this is because Boycott decided to take his woes to the English press, which escalated the whole thing drastically. He wrote a letter from Ireland to publicize the wrongs being done to him, and this is all from a site called Irish Central, But here are a few excerpts from his letter. Sir.
The following detail may be interesting to your readers. Is exemplifying the power of the Land League. My shepherd has been frightened into giving up his employment, though he has refused to give up the house he held for me. My blacksmith has received a letter threatening him if he does any more work for me. My lawn dress has also been ordered to give up my washing, so already he has dirty clothes, no blacksmithing, and his sheep are
running astray. A little boy twelve years of age, who carried my post bag to and from the neighboring town, was struck in order to desist from his work, since which time I've sent my little nephew for my letters, and even he, on the second October, was stopped on the road and threatened if he continue to act as my messenger. The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all
supplies to my house. And I've just received a message from the postmistress to say that the telegraph messenger was stopped and threatened on the road when bringing me a message. So you know things aren't going so well.
Seriously.
In addition to all this, he says, my farm is public property. The people wander over it with impunity. My crops are trampled upon, carried away in quantities. The locks on my gates are smashed. I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed unless I throw up everything and leave the country.
Wow.
Yeah, So obviously things are not going great for Boycott, but his publicizing the situation worked in a way. It became this major story in the English press, and the Daily Express, Daily Telegraph and all these other papers raised funds to send farmers to harvest this crops, and also newspapers sent a whole mess of correspondence over to cover the story, and more than a thousand men from the
Royal Irish Constibulary were lloyd to protect the harvesters. So in the end the episode was blown totally out of proportion, and it cost over ten thousand pounds to harvest about five hundred pounds worth of crops. Anyway, the whole thing was a disaster, and Boycott left Ireland on December first, eighteen eighty in disgrace, and his name became forever linked
to any campaign to bring down a tyrant. And in the end, the peasants gained a lot of power from wielding the boycott, and by the end of eighteen eighty the tactic was being used all over Ireland against the British.
Man makes it feel bad for Charles Boycott.
There it sounds like he deserved it. But you know, the silent treatment part is the hardest and probably hurt his.
Feelings the most. So that's rough.
So what's next from you?
All right?
Well, I want to talk about my favorite part of ice hockey. You know, I know nothing about hockey. So my favorite part is, of course the Zamboni, which comes to us from one Frank Zamboni.
Oh I love it. Tell me more, all right.
So this mostly comes to us from Smithsonian. But Frank's story starts in nineteen oh one. He's born to Italian immigrants. This is in Utah. The family moves around a bit. They go to Idaho and then they settle in California, and they're mostly doing work on farms. And so Frank and his brothers are pretty mechanical. They're early teens. They start doing work like tuning up tractors and fixing up baling machines, and also things like drilling wells, installing water pumps.
I mean, you know, very handy guys. And then at some point in the nineteen twenties or so, Frank and his brother Lawrence start an ice making plant, which is really important for farmers in agriculture. Now, you have to remember crops are being shipped by railroad and they need these massive ice blocks for refrigeration. So they're producing three hundred pounds slabs of this ice. So it's really big operation. Yeah,
it really is, and they're actually doing pretty well with it. Now, this was up until the mid nineteen thirties when electrical fridges and commercial refrigerations start hitting the railroad cars. So Frank and Lawrence sell their business nineteen thirty nine and they decide to do something fun with it. They decide to start an ice skating rink right across from their plant,
which becomes super popular. They call it Iceland Skating Rink. Now, the only thing is the rink ice gets damaged pretty easily. It's about three fourths of an inch thick, and replaning it takes a whole lot of efforts. You need these hoses and squeegees and planing tools and takes about an hour and a half to resurface the entire rink. And
that's if five people are working really hard to do it. Now, what Frank realized is that he was paying five or six people to stand around with nothing to do until the next resurfacing. So that's when Frank starts tinkering. He buys a tractor, makes all these little modifications to it, and by nineteen forty nine he has a Zamboni Model A, which can resurface a twenty thousand foot rink in about ten minutes.
That is insane. So I know what a zamboni is, but also I have no idea what it's doing. When it's sort of like driving around the ice, cant can you walk us through it?
Right?
I like how you asked the guy from Alabama, but I have had no idea what a zamboni is doing. But I can tell you how the Smithsonian describes it.
So here's what it says.
A conditioner mounted behind the rear wheels, contains a blade that shaves the ice, an augur that collects those shavings, a vacuum that sucks up dirty water, and sprayers that then lay down a fresh coat of water filling the cracks. Now behind all that is a squeegee, so in a single pass the machine can complete what was once a five person process.
That's amazing, and I love that there's a squeege as part of it.
Yeah, pretty brilliant.
You're right, there's something about a squeegee that it's just so super satisfying. And the principles of the zamboni actually haven't changed that much since it was first and vented. Anyway, in nineteen fifty four, the zamboni debuts and the NHL this was in Boston. By nineteen fifty seven, the NCAA is using them. By nineteen sixties. Zamboni's get used in the Winter Olympics, so they really caught on.
That's pretty amazing. So I don't know if you know this, but like, if I wanted to get a zamboni, do you know how much it would set me back?
I do think it's funny that, if I'm not mistaken, I don't think you know how to ice skate. So it's sort of a funny question for you to be asking.
But you don't know what I want a zamboni for.
True, You're right, I don't actually don't know.
I just want to put it on like concrete blocks in my front yard where, you know, give it away as a graduation present to my nephew who does play hockey.
That would be an amazing graduation present and very value one because it's a pretty expensive graduation. Give Zamboni's go for about one to two hundred thousand dollars. This depends on how much you want to trick it out, and that's partially because the machines are actually all hand built, whether that's coming from their California factory, either won in Ontario or the factory they've got in Sweden. But what's interesting is that Frank Zamboni is not a one trick pony.
He invented a whole bunch of other machines, including a milk tank, pasteurizer, a track cleaner for NASCAR, among other things. But it's the Zamboni machine that has made him a legend, which is especially great because Frank Zamboni never enjoyed ice skating. I thought that was interesting.
I mean, I'd rather drive a tractor than ice skate tunes.
That's right.
So here's a quick one. And it's actually an epinem name for the wrong person, which is the guillotine. Speaking of which, before we get to doctor Guillotine, did you watch the Olympics opening ceremonies this week at all?
Did I?
I watched, and then I had to go back and be like, what was it that I just watched?
I mean, you had the.
Of course incredible and touching moments like Celine Dion. The whole hot air balloon thing was cool, but like I mean, I did not see it coming. The whole like headless singer and that just the beheaded singer rather and the weird minions running around. Just the whole thing was so fricking weird. But it was all so much fun to watch, I know.
I saw this argument on x or Twitter where someone was saying to John Green, our friend and the writer, that the Beijing Olympics opener was so much better, and he wrote, respectfully, the choreography is good, but there were no threesomes, no minions, no decapitated dictator spouses, no rain, no heavy metal music, and no being thirty minutes late to light the torch because you're French.
That's right, That's accurate.
Which I love. So back to doctor Guillotine. The story I'd heard was that this Parisian doctor, Joseph Thickness Gillotine had invented the guillotine and pushed for it as this more humane way to execute people during the French Revolution and all of that is partially true. So Guillotine was a major advocate for the machine because it was swift and allowed the accused to die with a shred of dignity.
As he put it, when he lobbied for the guillotine, he said, it can cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never even feel it, so unlike things like hanging or burning people to the stake, or even using an executioner and an axe, which sometimes didn't get the job done on the first chop. You know, Guillotine was looking for something much more humane. But the thing is he was little more than an advocate. The first National razor, as it was nicknamed, was actually designed
by another doctor from France's Academy of Surgery. This doctor named Antoine Lewis, and the machine was initially called the Luizette, but as the Revolution ensued and France took up Guillotine's suggestion, the machine took on Guillotine's name. But this part is
really interesting to me. According to mental class, Guillotine was horrified by all the bodies that piled up from it, and he was quote very distressed at the association, and when he died in eighteen fourteen, his family petitioned the French government to change the name of the hated machine. But when the government refused to do that, Guillotine's family actually changed their name to distance themselves from the phenomena.
And if you look it up, like what did Guillotine's family change his name to, it's really hard to find.
Wow, all these origins are so interesting. I just love this topic. Yeah, here's another one that's a little dubious and shouldn't be named for the person that's actually named after. But did you know that salmonella is named after America's first doctor of veterinary medicine.
This was Daniel E. Salmon. Did you know this?
No, I had no idea, But it should.
Be named for a pathologist named Theobald Smith. This is all coming from the NIH site. Smith was the son of a German immigrant and a tailor, and Smith grew up relatively poor in Albany, New York, but based on his early brilliance, he earned this full ride to Cornell, where he studies philosophy and later some medicine, but really was fascinated by bacteriology. And after he graduates, he doesn't have the money to travel to Europe to study with
Pasteur or other leading scientists in this field. So he joins something called the Bureau of Animal Industry. But because he can read French and German, this gives him a really big leg up in this process. And so in eighteen eighty five, is trying to curb various epidemics that are inflicting farm animals and at the time he's trying to figure out what was causing hog cholera. And he ends up isolating and identifying this bacteria known as salmonella.
But before it can be named, his supervisor, Daniel Salmon, swoops in and takes credit for himself. In fact, he published a paper on the topic. So Salmon doesn't name Smith at all in this whole process.
That is insane. First of all, it's insane that he's figuring out this whole thing around the time of the Civil War, right, I mean, that's so early. But you know, does Smith stay bitter about the whole thing? Does he try to get semonella renamed? You know?
Not really.
He's kind of this humble genius who cared more about his work. So he continues to work with Salmon, and together they discover that injecting dead bacteria and animals can create immunity from diseases. He ends up coming up with the idea for cattle dips to kill ticks and stop these cattle fevers. He works on bovine tb comes up with a vaccine for diphtheria. Actually theorizes that mosquitos are the vector from Lari. I mean, truly just a brilliant guy.
He is kind of a remarkable scientist and should definitely be better known than he is.
I mean, in some ways, it's kind of fitting that seminella makes us sick and he's not associated with that.
That's actually a good way to think about it. I'll feel okay about it. And I'm sort of sad he was robbed, but I feel good about it. So what do you have next?
Well, here's one on the opposite side of the spectrum, someone who gave credit to the original innovator. It's for the boison berry, which was developed by a man named Rudolph Boisen, who was actually a California horticulturist. I found a few places that told a story, but the most detailed one actually comes from this site called the Devil
War's Parsley it's this great horticultural site. But basically Boison had this vision of a better berry, so he was trying to create a hybrid of blackberries, raspberries, dewberries, and loganberry. But ultimately he grows this beautiful maroon colored, two inch long berry. He takes the vines to his in laws farm in Anaheim, and he also shares them with a local nursery, where the berry gets called the sensation berry
of the twentieth century. Right, that's how it gets advertised, and the guy who runs the nursery gets so excited about the prospect of this new berry that he posts a letter to this guy at the Department of Agriculture named George Darrow, basically to extol the berry's virtues. Anyway, the strange shaped berry really does not take off when this nursery tries to sell it and boys and eventually switches jobs to the parks department and has this tragic accident.
He falls down a fire pole and basically is hospitalized and has to stop working. But then four years later, for some reason, Darrow is dusting off his letters and he gets super curious about whatever happened to this berry, so he goes to that local nursery to talk to the guy who wrote that letter. That owner has passed away and they no longer have any of the vines there. But he's just obsessed with this idea of like what
this berry could taste like. So he pulls his friend Walter Not in and together they locate a bedridden boison and they ask him where they can find the vines, and he says, maybe try his in law's old land, which they no longer own, So they go there. They ask the new owners if they can forge land, and eventually they find these really pathetic vines that are being suffocated by the overgrowth, and they ask if they can take them back, and not basically nurses them back to health.
And you know, when people ask him at his local farmstand what the berries he's selling are called, he says boison berries, after the original inventure. So the crazy part, though, is that the berries just start flying off the shelves. Missus Knots turns the berries into this popular pie and the whole endeavor helps him build this berry empire, which you might have heard of as Knots Berry Farm.
That is amazing.
I love the idea of a berry empire two, which is something that feels exciting about it.
That's a fun one.
I think I will stick with farming here because here's when I was surprised to learn, which is how we got the word maverick. Now this comes from the Saturday Evening Post. But Samuel Maverick was this lawyer from Texas. This was the mid nineteenth century, and Maverick was apparently a pretty good lawyer and a nice one as well, because when one of his clients couldn't pay off his debt to him, he accepted four hundred head of cattle instead. Of course, Maverick was a lawyer, not a rancher, so
he hired someone to manage the cattle for him. Unfortunately, the person he hired was fairly lazy and left the cattle unbranded, let them roam all over the place. That ultimately meant that other ranchers saw it as an opportunity to steal the cattle and brand them as their own.
So the word maverick first got used as a term for any unbranded wandering cattle, but over time it changed from referring to a cow without a master who wanders aimlessly to a cow who rejects being mastered and chooses its own directions.
You can see where it goes.
Yeah, that's really funny. It actually reminds me of this thing I read a few weeks ago about this cow named Chico from Saint Louis. Did you read this article?
I think I did.
I saw it a few places, but I also saw it upworthy. And this cow was determined not to become a burger, so it broke through like three fences at a slaughterhouse, and I think there were like five or six.
Cows that fold sea.
Running through traffic and people are chasing. I mean, the most amazing part is that someone started to go fund me to send all of them to a cow sanctuary. So now Chico and his friends are in some like Penning Zoo or sanctuary in California.
But that's pretty awesome.
I know, if I find the story, I'll put in the links where people look up. But let me talk about what I have next.
Let's do it.
The saxophone, which gets his name from the Belgian musician Antoine Joseph Adolph Sachs. And I didn't realize this, but sax invented the instrument way back in eighteen four, which is so long ago. I had no idea the saxophone was around that long. But Sax's parents were instrument makers too, and they even made instruments for the royal courts, and they tweaked the design of the French horn, amongst other things,
into something called the sax horn. But the saxophone was Sax's way of trying to blend the best of woodwind instruments but the best of brass instruments, which you know, makes a lot of sense when you think about it. It's the only sort of reed instrument with this brass around it. But as ingenius as Sax was, he was one of the unluckiest people in history. His mom never actually thought he'd live long because of his bad luck. And this is just a short list of things that
almost killed him. He accidentally drank a bowl of acid, mistaking it for milk. He was hit on the head by a roofstone, he fell from three stories, He had a hot frying pan fall on him, He fell into a river and nearly drown He received serious burns from a gunpowder explosion. And he almost died when he accidentally swallowed a pin.
Right, this is insane.
I'm pretty sure all those things happened in that one scene of the Naked Gun.
If I'm not mistaken, that's wild.
I know it sounds like some real lunitudes business. But he invents the saxophone, but spends twenty years trying to pattent it and fighting off legal battles from rival instrument makers, and he just ends up bankrupt over and over. It is really sad. And this is how Lisburs puts it. He was a controversial figure who seemed to collect enemies
who constantly tried to thwart him. But on the plus side, right like John Coltrane and Kenny g wouldn't have careers without him, so I guess he does have some sort of a legacy.
And of course you can't forget Lisa Simpson. That was her outlet to deal with it all. Okay, I know we've got a few more facts to get to before we're done, but let's take a quick break.
Welcome back to part TI genis where we're talking about eponyms aka words that are named after people. So will we've got two more facts to go. What is your final fact for this show?
Tough call, because there's still some good ones here, But why don't we talk about General Ambrose Burnside, who had a checkered military career but a great facial topiary. So it's sort of worth the trade off there, I guess. Now, sideburns definitely existed before General Burnside, as the BBC points out, murals of Alexander the Great and dignified Hindu rulers show off their facial hair styling. Charles Darwin and various aristocratic Brits had the hairstyle too, although then you know they
were referred to as side whiskers. I think, but Burnside, who was not known for his great military strategy, really glorified the look. I mean, he had these big, fluffy mutton chops which linked up with these fantastically bushy mustache whiskers. They really made him a household nameing like, I just really got into that description. But as Liz First points out, in eighteen sixty six, the Evening Telegraph in Philadelphia noted
how debonair the style was. The paperwrights quote, the style was so attractive that it had ladies swooning after a group of thieves, distracting them from all the honest men around.
I love that description, so friends, I just killed it with ladies and I guess this look was the axe body spray of its time, just attracting women.
A good way to describe it. Because the side whiskers was already a common phrase, the words got flipped over time, and the facial hair eventually just got called sideburns.
Amazing. I think what I like about that quote so much, though, is that the like this idea that honest men can't grow sideburns, but scoundrels absolutely can.
I think that's the way it works. But anyway, all right, you got one more fact, Mango, what do you want to end on?
How about we talk about the men behind the leotard Jeules Leotard, who I did not know was a person. Apparently Jules was quite right. He was on his way to becoming a lawyer and passed this like difficult legal exam. But ultimately he decided his passions were in gymnastics, and particularly the trapeze, which his father had set up for him over a swimming pool for him to practice on. But what set him apart from others was that he started doing jumps between trapiezes. Right, so he's one of
the first few people to like jump between trapiezs. He starts, performing on everything from two to five different trapezes. He also didn't work with any netting, and he also landed from a great height onto a few stacked mattresses. But while the Arabatics were incredible, and you know, it did make him a celebrity in Europe and America's and he was traveling everywhere from you know, London, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, it's really his costume that sort of drummed up his popularity,
and he actually had stands on all continents. As Harper's Bizarre puts it quote, his skin tight leotard made him the heart throb of La Maruse de Leotard, or Leotard's lovers. And according to the Journal of Victorian Culture, this was really at a time before male muscle mass was fashionable, so the tight outfit accentuating his body was almost revolutionary for the time, according to the journal quote, Leotard's writing and photographs demonstrate he knew his popularity was connected to
his desirability and his prowess. In his memoir, Leotard ridicules the women who admired him and carefully refutes that he padded his tights to emphasize his leg muscle, so I'd love that they're claiming he's stuffing his.
Tights, but totally yeah.
Anyway, the next time you see someone in the leotard, just know that it all goes back to one of history's greatest trafez artists, Jules Leotard.
Oh, I like that.
I thought I had sealed this week's episode with the zamboni, but I think you take it for Leotard. And to be clear, I would have given this week's trophy to Dylan if he'd shown up on a zamboni in his leah. He didn't do that on Saturdays. Does that on Saturdays most Saturdays.
So I'm gonna give it to you. Mango.
Congrats, thank you will and such a missed opportunity for Dylan. But don't forget. If you've got a favorite eponym that we missed, or any other comments you want to tell us, drop our moms a line at Peaty Genius Moms at gmail dot com. A lot of you have asked, Yes, our moms actually do read these emails and they will
pass them along. And if you like the show, please tell your friends, make your kids listen to it in a car, ask your dentist to play it while you're getting a filling and rate and review the show on iTunes. That's it for this week's episode from Will, Dylan, Mary, and myself. Thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongish Chatikler and
research by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Viny Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.