Boycott
Boycott is an eponym, a word derived from the name of a person. In this case the unlucky individual was Captain Charles Boycott, who was an English landholder in Ireland in 1880. He owned many, many square miles of Ireland, but didn’t live anywhere near his holdings, and charged exorbitant rent to the Irish families that had been living on that land for thousands of years. In September of 1880, shortly before the harvest was due to be gathered, many of his tenants demanded that he lower their rents; but instead of doing so, he expelled them. In return, the Irish Land League, a union of farmers and other concerned citizens, organized a boycott of Boycott: no one was to do any business of any kind with him. He was completely ignored by his workers, his personal servants, local businessmen, and the post office. He could not buy anything from shops, and people would not even sit near him in church.
In danger of missing the harvest, Boycott somehow managed to get some 50 people to agree to work his tenants’ fields. He hired protection for them, fearing that they might be assaulted; but this backfired, because it ended up costing ten thousand pounds to harvest £350 worth of potatoes. After the harvest, the boycott continued. By November, the incident was so famously known that the name boycott began to be used as a verb in its own right in newspapers, with the meaning it has today.
In December, Boycott and his family left Ireland for good.
Boycott’s family name comes from a village in Buckinghamshire, most likely meaning “boys’ cottage”, a small house for servants.
The sound of boycott suggests a burst of energy that is both earthy and intellectual, which leads to the drawing forth of Source energy and setting it in motion. It may be that Boycott’s name was so readily adopted as an eponym because its sound lent itself nicely to the movement he unwillingly instigated.
In belated honor of Labor Day. With thanks to Nio for suggesting this word of the day!
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September 4th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
I knew it was someone’s name, but I didn’t know it was a English landlord. And to think I took a History of Ireland course in college…
One of my favorite things about English is how words can be turned into verbs. You know, like Bobbitt. Think Lorena Bobbitt and then say “I’ll bobbitt you if you keep it up.”
September 7th, 2007 at 3:35 am
Boycott is something I’ve known the history of for a long time, practically since I started in linguistics. It’s such a classic example of an eponym that the teachers always use it as an example…
Verbing is extremely cool, yeah. Not many other languages can do it as easily as English — English has so little verbal morphology that it’s a simple matter to just grab a handy noun and stick it in the right place to be a verb… Plus English has a very long and proud history of verbing, going right back into Middle English.
Bobbit is indeed an excellent example, even though it’s a rather… uncomfortable one.
September 9th, 2007 at 8:34 am
I was thinking more about the word boycott yesterday on my way to Everett to see the in-laws.
When one writes someone else’s name (bell hooks notwithstanding) one is supposed to capitalize: Jeff Lilly. Vera Brittain. Rodrigo Santoro (purrr!). But somehow Boycott has lost its right to be capitalized and instead is written as boycott. Why the demotion from capital to not?
September 10th, 2007 at 10:01 am
The simple answer is that names are capitalized in English, and common nouns and verbs are not (unless, of course, they’re in titles or at the beginning of a sentence or something like that). If you’re talking about Captain Boycott, that’s using it as a name, so you capitalize it. If you’re talking about boycotting someone, that’s using it as a verb, so you don’t capitalize it.
English used to have basically random capitalization, as you can see by looking at the original Declaration of Independence.
Over time, we developed the rules we have today. Other languages have different rules; German, for example, capitalizes common nouns in addition to names.