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SPEAKER_01: Every kid learns differently. So it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out I excel the online learning platform for kids I excel covers math, language arts, science and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up now is the best time to get I excel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off I excel membership when they sign up today at I excel dot com slash invisible. That's the letters I excel dot com slash invisible. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Helen Zaltzman's The Illusionist is a show about language and words. That's kind of like saying that this show is about architecture and design. The description doesn't quite capture the way we use those lenses to view the world at large. My favorite words are eponyms. If you don't know what an eponym is, you are about to find out. Because I love eponyms so much, each year Helen produces an episode of The Illusionist about eponyms, which feature me talking a little bit and we put two of those episodes together for you to enjoy. One quick note, Helen is from the UK where they often refer to ballpoint pens as biros. You would have picked that up through context, but I just wanted to eliminate that half second of confusion that you might have if you're not from there. All right, without further ado, here's Helen Zaltzman's The Illusionist.
SPEAKER_03: A while ago, Roman tweeted the following, I would totally listen to an ongoing radio series comprised solely of the stories behind eponyms. Firstly, I thought, what's an eponym? Eponym noun, a word or name derived from the name of a person, or a person after whom a discovery invention place, etc is named. Secondly, I wondered what it was about eponyms that got Roman so excited.
SPEAKER_01: An eponym, just almost by definition, has some kind of story, even if it isn't the origin story, it has something where it got the eponym attached to it, which is a good enough story to be retold. And so for that reason, I just, I kind of love them and it sort of starts a good conversation, I think. That's what I love about eponyms. I've always liked silhouette because I think it's a little bit of a slur if I have this right. But I think that like really elaborate painting portraiture was in fashion. Silhouette was the head of the French treasury, was cutting back into their version of austerity. And that's right at the time when outline drawings were becoming in fashion, which are clearly not as elaborate, didn't require an artist, didn't require months of time. And so that type of a portrait was a la silhouette, like a really like stripped down, simple, didn't require real skill. And I love that because it's a bit of a slight at the same time as being descriptive. And so I love those ones like that. Well, if you like silhouette Roman, you're probably going to love Baudelarization after
SPEAKER_03: the English editor Thomas Baudelaire, who in 1818 released a version of Shakespeare's plays that he'd reworked to make them more suitable for women and children, as in he'd taken up all of the naughty bits and foul language. So Lady Macbeth doesn't even say her famous line out out damn spot anymore, but out crimson spot as if she's in a laundry detergent advert. To be fair, Baudelaire's edition was actually a huge success and brought Shakespeare to a much wider audience. But his name does now stand for cack handed expurgation.
SPEAKER_01: When it comes to word origins, an eponym is the surest bet that you're going to get a good story out of it. That's what I love about them. So it's taken me this long to realize. I know what is what is your problem? I told you from the very beginning, it should just be an eponym show.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I love them. So you should start do one do a regular one every six weeks. Do an eponym.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, I'll see. I'll see how this one goes. Yeah. I'm going to start small with some eponymous items you're probably all familiar with. You might be holding one right now. The Bic and the Biro. I chose these for the first eponyms attempt because I thought they're in the spirit of both Roman show 99% Invisible, which examines a lot of commonplace objects, and of this one, because this is a show about words and what is stationary without words and words without stationary?
SPEAKER_02: Stationary is the physical infrastructure of words.
SPEAKER_03: That is James Ward, author of Adventures in Stationary, a journey through your pencil case. So James knows a lot about ballpoint pens, which we might casually refer to as biros or bics.
SPEAKER_02: I guess what's kind of interesting is that for lots of people, they they're just one thing. So people say a big biro.
SPEAKER_03: And is that controversial?
SPEAKER_02: It's kind of odd in the same way as you. I mean, you wouldn't say, I'm going to have a can of Pepsi Coke. Or I suppose you might say I just bought a new Dyson Hoover. Yeah. So I guess it's when when one brand or name becomes the generic and the other one remains the specific.
SPEAKER_03: How do you think biro managed to become the generic?
SPEAKER_02: Laszlo Biro, he I mean, he didn't invent the ballpoint, but he kind of perfected it.
SPEAKER_03: The invention of the ballpoint going by a patent filed in 1888 is credited to John J. Loud, who had a great name for a product, but not a good pen, which left room for Laszlo Biro to swoop in and claim ballpoint victory. Born in Budapest in 1899, Laszlo Biro had been variously a medical student, a stage hypnotist, an insurance salesman, a race car driver. And eventually he became a journalist, which was what he was working as in the early 1930s, when he invented the pen that would make his name and indeed take his name.
SPEAKER_02: And apparently one day he was in the print room and the heat of the machinery caused his fountain pen to leak. And so he wanted to develop an alternative way of creating a pen that didn't leak due to the heat and pressure. And he saw the way that the cylindrical print presses rolled the ink onto the page. And so he thought, oh, if only you could have like a miniature version of those. But the problem is that a cylinder can only roll in forwards and backwards, whereas when you're writing, it needs to roll in all directions. And the story that is almost certainly not true, but is frequently told, is he was sitting in a cafe looking out the window, trying to make sense of how you make a cylinder roll in all directions. And it had been raining outside and there's some kids playing with marbles and one of them rolled a marble through a puddle. And then he saw the sort of line of water that the marble made on the pavement. And then he suddenly realized, oh, well, a ball rolls in all directions. I mean, that seems quite obvious that a ball rolls in all directions. Like all ball games are based on that principle. It took him, these children playing with marbles for him to make the connection. And he had like this weird experience. I think he was like checking into a hotel and he signed in using his prototype pen. And the guy next to him kind of saw the pen and was like, oh, that's rather interesting. Tell me about your pen. It's not the best pickup line, but that passing pen enthusiast turned out to be the former
SPEAKER_03: president of Argentina, visiting Europe to promote trade links. So in due course, Laszlo Byro moved to Argentina to grow his pen empire. Penpire? These kind of stories that they had these prototype pens and they take them to meetings
SPEAKER_02: to try and get investors. And Laszlo would be doing all of the talking and his colleague would be under the table. He'd be like, cause some of the pens worked and some of the pens didn't. And so he'd get out a little scrap of paper and he'd be sort of like scribbling on a bit of paper to try and get the pen to work. And if it started working, then he'd go, oh, and here's a sample. Whereas if it didn't start working, then he'd give him a signal and Laszlo would be like, unfortunately we don't have any prototypes with us, but we'll come right next time we come.
SPEAKER_03: So the Byros were a bit rubbish.
SPEAKER_02: They had lots of problems that they had to resolve. They had to find an ink that was viscous enough that it wouldn't leak out, but then not so thick that it would clog or jam. They had to find a way that you could keep it in like a jacket pocket and it wouldn't overheat and make the pen leak. So once they cracked it, then other people were able to come along and go, oh, this is great. So Byros teams up with Henry Martin, he was involved in the aeronautics industry in the UK because he needed, in order to make the pens, you need ball bearings or very, very fine ball bearings and the aviation industry makes the best ball bearings. And then, I mean, this is during the second world war at this point, but they started manufacturing these ballpoint pens and they gave them to the RAF because if you're flying really high and you need to write down air coordinates or whatever, you want a pen that's not going to leak because of the air pressure. And these pens worked. Hooray!
SPEAKER_03: But it wasn't all smooth rolling thenceforth. There was a lot of competition, albeit mostly rubbish. In the United States, a man called Milton Reynolds wanted to be the first to launch a ballpoint in that country. Yeah, the Reynolds International, and it was described as this kind of atomic age superpen.
SPEAKER_03: He didn't actually put in much effort to make the superpen a super pen. He just wanted to be the first to market. So everyone bought his pen.
SPEAKER_02: He was a kind of opportunistic huckster. He kind of just rushed out this pen, which caused like a sensation at the time. When it first launched in New York, there were just crowds, like thousands of people lining the streets. Like in Romania for pens. Yeah. Or, you know, when there's like a new iPhone or something. It was like that, but for pens, it was crappy. And it came with a guarantee that if it broke within two years, then they'd replace it. And they just had to replace hundreds of thousands of these things. In the US that created the market for the ballpoint, but it also then nearly killed it off because people had this terrible experience with these bad pens.
SPEAKER_03: But then another major ballpoint player entered the fray. A manufacturer of fountain pens who kept getting inquiries for ballpoint pen parts, Marcel Bich, spelt B-I-C-H. But for his eponymous pen, he dropped the H so that you wouldn't think the Bich crystal was pronounced Bich or Bich or any other way than Bich.
SPEAKER_02: This was after the war that the Bichs came along and they licensed the technology from Biro. There were these very complicated legal battles where each party kept suing the other one because they claimed the infringement. And Miles Martin, which was the UK company that Biro was involved with, they were suing Bich and there was all of these complications. And then sort of with Richard Curtis, romantic comedy, inevitability, Henry Martin, who ran Miles Martin company and his son married the daughter of Marcel Bich. It's real Romeo and Juliet stuff.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: But you can imagine that it must've been tricky when they're choosing which pen to sign the marriage certificate with. Maybe they just went for a pencil. Yeah. Bich grew and grew and grew. And how did they manage that? Because that particular pen, the Bich crystal, the one that everyone refers to as the Bich Biro with its hexagonal body and its familiar cap with the hole in the end, that particular pen just works. So it's meritocracy. Yeah, exactly. And it's something like, I think half of all ballpoint pens that are sold in the world every day are Bich crystals. So if you think how many other millions of types of ballpoints that there are, like there's supermarket or own brand versions. I've got this one I stole from a hotel.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I'm almost ashamed to show it to you.
SPEAKER_02: It's a stolen hotel. The Bich crystal just works. And there's one in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I don't know if it's necessarily always on display, but they've got it in their collection somewhere. You have to ask. Yeah. It's just a little bit outside.
SPEAKER_03: You have to pay $20 to see a pen that you could buy for 50 cents. Yeah, but it's a different experience.
SPEAKER_03: Let's take a little etymology break. Pen and pencil may share a syllable, but don't let that dupe you into thinking they have a common linguistic origin. Pen derives from the Latin pena, which meant feather. So saying quill pen is a tautology. Good to know. Pencil meanwhile, came from the Latin for a painter's brush, pena silis, a diminutive of peniculus, which meant little tail. And the Latin for tail is also where we get the word penis. Anyway, back to pens and how their development influenced the development of writing itself.
SPEAKER_02: The ability to make marks more precisely means that you're able to make more complex marks. So if all you have is a bit of stick and a clay tablet, you can only produce quite basic scripts. Like cuneiform is quite angular, but then if you start using like a reed brush on papyrus, that offers you more flexibility. And then if you start using, instead of papyrus, which is quite rough, if you use parchment or vellum, which is extremely smooth, and you use a quill, which is very flexible, then you're able to produce extremely beautiful, like illustrated texts or illuminated texts. And so with those developments, it means that the characters that you're able to produce are more easy to distinguish. So you're able to have more characters and so you're able to produce writing, which is more complex, I suppose.
SPEAKER_03: My school would only let us use fountain pens. We were not allowed to write with ballpoints. And this seems to have been quite a common attitude towards ballpoints for a long time. A fountain pen can produce thick lines, thin lines, flourishes, and thus invest your handwriting with a lot of character and flair. But the ball in a ballpoint produces a line of uniform thickness. So a lot of people believe that the pens were detrimental to handwriting.
SPEAKER_02: Laszlo's daughter, she said her father would often respond to these complaints. And he used to hear people say that the ballpoint was ruining writing skills. And he'd smile and say, well, writing comes from the heart, if we can help the hand to perform the task, what is so wrong with that? And I think there's nothing wrong with that. Well done, Laszlo Byro.
SPEAKER_03: I think it's interesting that their names are on products that are extremely successful, but also disposable.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And also they are kind of disposable in that you can know what a big is, or you can know what a byro is, but you don't need to know who Marcel is or who Laszlo is. So they've kind of made this disposable contribution to history and in the same way they've made themselves disposable.
SPEAKER_03: So if your eponymous product is successful, your involvement in it, and even your own identity is subsumed, which might not sit that well with the kind of people who put their names on things. Because calling something after yourself seems like quite an egomaniacal choice to me. I mean, I may be wrong, but my impression is a lot of eponyms are not the person naming
SPEAKER_01: them after themselves. It's more than a sign by another person.
SPEAKER_03: That's like a mark of respect. Yeah. Do you think that people who've got a disease or horrible medical condition named after them, that's quite a sad way to be remembered, isn't it? I don't know.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it depends because if you're a researcher, you've probably gotten past the feeling of grossness around disease and you probably just enjoy the fact that you were instrumental in its discovery or successful treatment. So I have a feeling that I could, I could even live with a horrible disease being named after me.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. But then you have people who only remembered you because you're what killed their grandma. You feel good about that?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Just be remembered. I think that's the most important thing. It doesn't matter what it's for.
SPEAKER_03: That's what serial killers are banking on. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And now part two of the illusionist eponyms saga, where we learn some bad news about eponyms.
SPEAKER_00: There's a shift, a gradual shift, away from using eponyms in medicine.
SPEAKER_03: Who's this enemy of eponyms?
SPEAKER_00: My name is Isaac Seamans and I'm a resident physician in the department of family and community medicine at the university of Toronto. There's two camps in medicine currently, people who want to use eponyms and people who want to move away from eponyms. And there's, there's a few different reasons for that. People that are more in touch with history, perhaps, and then people that are more moving towards kind of accuracy in language. In broad strokes, that's the controversy.
SPEAKER_03: You can see the practical case for this shift. Medical workers have to stay abreast of an awful lot of terminology. You try memorising a load of surnames and which ailment each one represents.
SPEAKER_00: A list of diseases with somebody's last name as the title gives you no information and you can kind of get bungled up. Whereas you can kind of fake your way through, if you will, if the name of the disease says something about the disease itself.
SPEAKER_03: To use an example that was all over the news when I was growing up, CJD, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The name alone doesn't tell you much about what it is unless you're familiar with the early 20th century work of the German neurologists Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt and Alphonse Maria Jakob. The eponym is also not easy to spell. At the far end of the scale, tabloids called the condition the human form of mad cow disease, a rather cartoonish term for a brutal and incurable illness. So the other option is the scientific term. CJD is a form of transmissible spongiform encephalitis, encephalitis from the medical Latin encephalon from the ancient Greek encephalos, meaning brain. The itis suffix denotes inflammation. CJD Spongiform encephalitis, to me that would
SPEAKER_00: be easier because that tells you something about, I mean, although it's Latin, it gives you a bit of information so you could kind of piece it together if you had to. Yeah, a little spongy.
SPEAKER_03: CJD Yeah, it turns your brain to sponge essentially.
SPEAKER_00: So it's all there.
SPEAKER_03: If anything, that's more literal than a lot of disease names would be. Yeah, I think so. Perhaps when you're receiving a diagnosis, there's some psychological protection from the grim reality of what's happening in your body being somewhat disguised by science speak or the opaqueness of an eponym. On the other hand, an overly academic or incomprehensible description of the condition can amplify a patient's stress and fear.
SPEAKER_00: One thing that hopefully is changing in medicine that maybe ties in with this whole issue is the sort of blackboxing of knowledge and the sort of protective nature of different professions. And I think it's similar to law or engineering maybe where, you know, in order to protect our jobs and to seem like we have some sort of power over the people we work with, we kind of make things possibly more difficult to understand than they need to be. And we use a jargon and a language that needs to be taught to be understood. So I don't know if there's some sort of like unconscious protectionism of our practice involved with naming of diseases and like because even the non-eponym names are very like complicated and don't mean a lot to people.
SPEAKER_03: It's quite a common thing in language like the Bible using quite lofty sounding language so that you maintain that division of status. But I just wonder whether there's a decent middle ground in medicine between wibbly wobbly heart disease and a long complicated name.
SPEAKER_00: You don't want it so simple that you sound kind of stupid or like you don't know what's going on when you say it, I guess. But it's also in medicine as in everything, communication is so important and so you want to strike that middle ground where you're making sense to the person who it's most important to which is the patients.
SPEAKER_03: So in some circumstances it's better to use the eponym because it might be more familiar.
SPEAKER_00: We learn about trisomy 21 which is a genetic disorder that we're encouraged to speak about referring to the actual genetic issue whereas Down syndrome is the common eponym. I think the lay public as well are more familiar with that language.
SPEAKER_03: Some concepts are really hard to describe without the eponym and with an eponym much more memorable. Would the Heimlich maneuver be something that people knew if it wasn't attached to a name
SPEAKER_01: like Heimlich, you know? No, I don't think so. MS.
SPEAKER_03: Would it have made the news in May of this year when 96-year-old Dr. Henry Heimlich himself saved a woman from choking on a piece of hamburger meat by using the maneuver that bears his name?
SPEAKER_01: JF So I still like them in these ways that they help tell an interesting story. But I totally get why they're not. I'm not so tied to my worldview or nostalgia that I cannot accept that it would be better another way. MS.
SPEAKER_03: Well good because there are certainly some aspects to eponyms that I don't think you'd like Roman.
SPEAKER_00: RS A lot of the argument against eponyms is that it's sort of a simplification of complex stories where generally a white dead male will get the eponym. But if you look at the process of discovering and categorizing diseases, it's often over the course of more than a lifetime and it involves many, many people. And it's sort of a false history to just use this name. And then there are like ridiculous extremes where there's like four or five people that all have a similar form of the disease named after them. And then later on they discover that it was the same disease the whole time and then it gets all messed up. Like I have one of them written down because I could never remember it but I think it's the longest eponym that I've come across. And it's a four barreled name if you will. And it's Meyer-Rokitansky-Kusterhauser syndrome. MS.
SPEAKER_03: Meyer-Rokitansky-Kusterhauser syndrome is congenital abnormalities in or absence of the uterus and vagina. RS It sounds like four people all had some sort
SPEAKER_00: of claim to the discovery of the disease. MS.
SPEAKER_03: Meyer-Rokitansky-Kusterhauser syndrome is congenital abnormalities in or absence of the uterus and vagina. RS There were far more than four. People have been writing about the condition all the way back as far as the Greek physician Hippocrates in the 5th century BC. Meyer, Rokitansky, Kusterhauser and Hauser all made significant contributions to the understanding of the disease but they weren't even working together. Meyer described the syndrome in a paper in 1829. That's 50 years before Kusterhauser was born, 92 years before the birth of Hauser, who went on to name the disease Meyer-Rokitansky-Kusterhauser syndrome. Someone else added Hauser to the end. MS.
SPEAKER_00: Meyer-Rokitansky-Kusterhauser syndrome You don't hear that disease name a lot, but I feel like every time I hear it, the order is a little different. So I don't even know if there's like a standardised name order to it. RS Maybe they shuffle it so that everyone gets
SPEAKER_03: turn at the front.
SPEAKER_00: MS. Meyer-Rokitansky-Kusterhauser syndrome.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they take turns. RS The problem with quite a lot of eponyms is the person named therein. MS.
SPEAKER_00: Meyer-Rokitansky-Kusterhauser syndrome is a condition where you get joint pain related to a kind of systemic inflammation. It's named after Hans Reiter, who was a famous Nazi war criminal who did terrible experiments on inmates at Buchenwald. RS Hans Reiter discovered the eponymous syndrome
SPEAKER_03: in 1916 when he treated a soldier during the First World War, prior to his Nazi affiliations, of which the American rheumatologist Dr. Ephraim Engelman was unaware when he coined the eponym in 1942. But he later joined the campaign, which began in 1977, to replace the eponym with a name that doesn't honour somebody associated with war crimes and mass murder. If you don't want to evoke Hans Reiter, you can call this condition reactive arthritis. But while usage of the eponymous term has decreased, it is still being used in medical schools and in journals. The debate rages on. Do you pick and choose which parts of history are marked? Or do you allow a person's scientific achievements to be honoured despite whatever horrible things they did? Controversial things, eponyms.
SPEAKER_00: CB There's even more controversy about eponyms where there's like a sub-conflict, if you will, going on about whether to use the possessive or not in eponyms. So there's even within people that use eponyms or don't, the people that use eponyms are having debates about whether it should be Down's apostrophe S for possessive or Down's syndrome. So there's a lot of research about like, which should be used in medical journals to simplify searches so that you don't have to search both terms.
SPEAKER_01: I think that's the one thing I would simplify. I would get rid of all apostrophes. Wow. That seems like the right solution.
SPEAKER_03: Caesar salad. It's not Caesar's salad. Caesar knows. But yeah, the apostrophes, it messes it up a little too much and you shouldn't have to
SPEAKER_01: think about it. There's already enough to think about. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: You need to worry about the horrible disease you've got. Exactly. That you've got to cure.
SPEAKER_01: And the great rich story behind the name. You know, those two things, that's enough. It's enough to juggle. Something to keep you occupied in the waiting room, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: Exactly. An eponym just does have so much story embedded in it. In fact, last night I was eating dinner with my kids and my wife and we were talking about childbirth and mentioned the cesarean section, the way that these two babies, you know, my twin twin boys came into this world and it caused us to talk about Caesar and was Caesar really the first person to have, to be the result of a cesarean section in which case I have no actual knowledge of this, but I said probably not. It's hard to imagine that the first person to be born through this procedure also became one of the most famous people in all of history. And invented one of the most famous salads.
SPEAKER_03: See, F and M's are just like, they're endlessly fascinating.
SPEAKER_01: But it causes great conversation at a dinner table with two nine year olds and my wife and we had fun talking about it. And even the parts of it that are the, you know, the caveats and generally the etymology with the tidiest story is the least true. You know, it's just like, that's the nature of it. Unfortunately, they're shaggier and messier than they, in general, the true ones are shaggier and messier.
SPEAKER_03: You have some gory dinner table conversation.
SPEAKER_01: It was getting on the edge there. I mean, if you're talking messy.
SPEAKER_03: Good grief.
SPEAKER_01: The Illusionist is produced by Helen Salzman with music by Martin Ostwick. Find it at the illusionist.org. That's illusionist with an A not an I. It was the first show created specifically for Radiotopia and I could not love it more. Subscribe now and then we can all talk about it on Twitter together. Ninety nine percent invisible is Delaney Hall, Sharife Youssef, Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sam Greenspan and me, Roman Mars. Katie Mingle is our senior editor. Kirk Colestead is our digital director and Taryn Mazza is the Baroness. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. USA for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, responds to emergencies and provides long term solutions for refugees in places like Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and many more. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence and persecution at their greatest moment of need. Every day, displaced families struggle to meet basic needs like providing meals and clean water for their children. For many, the last few years have been the hardest. The global repercussions of war in Ukraine leading to steep rises in the cost of basic commodities like food and fuel combined with the climate crisis and COVID-19 formed a triple threat. Because of the commitment of their compassionate donors, UNHCR sends relief supplies and deploys its highly trained staff anywhere in the world at any given time. UNHCR is able to deploy within 72 hours of a large scale emergency and jumpstart relief and protection assistance. Help deliver urgent aid. Your support can provide life saving care and hope for a better future. Donate to USA for UNHCR by visiting unrefugees.org slash donation. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need.
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