An eponym is a word named after somebody or someplace.

An eponym, almost by definition, comes with a story, making them some of the most intriguing words. Knowing what an eponym is also allows you to use the word eponymous, which is always a good way to sound smart.

Some of my favourite eponyms are now commonplace products that took the inventor's name. Some examples:

The Rubik's cube is an invention by Hungarian architecture professor Ernő Rubik. The cube has the fascinating property of being a solid object that's also fluid.

This year (2024), the Rubik's Cube turned 50, celebrating around half a billion cube sales, scores of speed-cubing championships, and documentaries. When Rubik first invented the cube, he wasn't sure it was solvable and only managed it for the first time several months after creating it.

In 2020, Rubik told the story of the cube in his book, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All.

The fabulously named jacuzzi, or more generally the hot tub, is named after the Italian Jacuzzi family. The seven brothers of the family—there were also six daughters—trained to become engineers, making plane propellers, irrigation systems and pumps before one of the brothers created a homemade bath to help his two-year-old son who was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. The rest, as they say, is history.

Saskia Solomon tells some of the brothers' story, which includes the court case Jacuzzi vs Jacuzzi, and the invention of the jacuzzi in the 2023 New York Times article, The Frothy Saga of the Jacuzzi Family.

After so long as what seems the most basic of foods, it was remarkable for me to learn that the humble sandwich was named after a person: John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Though he probably spent most of his time in London, the title itself is associated with the small town of Sandwich in Kent, in Southeast England.

The story goes that the Earl liked playing cards and wanted food he could eat without having to leave his game and that wouldn't give him sticky fingers that would damage the cards. Incarnations of open sandwiches appeared much earlier elsewhere. For example, the trencher—something I had to look up when reading Game of Thrones—involved serving food on top of old bread as a sort of plate. But it took the Earl's dedication to card playing, or at least desk work, to take the next step many years later.

László Bíró was a Hungarian-Argentine inventor who created the first truly successful ballpoint pen. In the US, the BiC is more common, an eponym this time from Marcel Bich.

It's said that Lázló experienced his fountain pen leaking from heat—fountain pens being very common before the ballpoint—and was inspired by a printing press that used a cylinder to spread the ink. All it needed was to go in all directions. Enter the ballpoint.

While the invention seems obvious in hindsight, perfecting it for robust, commercial use was challenging. For example, finding suitable ink for the tiny ball bearing to spread, which doesn't leak or clog and isn't overly affected by heat. Lázló teamed up with an aviation company—who use a lot of ball bearings—which also provided a great use case of finding a pen that wouldn't leak from the air pressure changes in planes. Later, BiC licenced the technology from Biro. A Bic Cristal® Ballpoint pen is part of the collection at the MoMA.

I only learned that silhouette was an eponym while preparing this sketch, but it's perhaps the best of all.

Étienne de Silhouette, a French government finance official tasked with curbing a French deficit in the 1700s, unwittingly gave his name to the classic black-on-white simple outline image of a person. His severe frugal policies of taxes, curbing royal spending and even melting down gold and silverware earned him the reputation of doing things cheaply. Hence, a cheap method of creating a portrait, cutting out black paper and laying it on a white background, became known as a silhouette.

Nearly everyone will recognise the fuel that Rudolf Diesel gave his name to and his diesel engine. Diesel created a breakthrough engine that was more efficient than typical steam engines while being smaller and weighing less.

Curiously, I learned that Diesel died in mysterious circumstances, disappearing on a journey across the English Channel in 1913.

An excellent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast featuring Helen Zaltzman of the Allusionist raised several interesting questions about eponyms I hadn't considered. Here are a few to think about:

Eponyms are common in medicine, for example, when we name a disease or condition after those playing a part in the discovery. However, the name, for example, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, tells a medical practitioner very little about the disease compared to a name that relates to the symptoms of the sufferer or the cause. Should examples like these be replaced with more practical names?

Eponyms almost always have a way of oversimplifying a story, often wrapping up complex histories with the names of white males. For example, rarely are products invented or diseases identified solely through the actions of one person. Yet an eponym chooses one, or some people, at the expense of others.

Eponyms may be the name of someone later discredited or who develops a tarnished reputation from other actions in their lives. Should someone who did evil deeds be remembered in an eponym or should it be changed?

Who knew eponyms could be so interesting?

Know some good eponyms with fun stories? I'd love to hear them.

Eponyms are distinct from the fun concept of Nominative determinism—an aptronym—where someone's name seemingly influenced their future actions or career choices (for example, Les McBurney — Volunteer firefighter).

I've covered a lot of eponyms over the years, far more than I realised. Using the handy list page on the site, I've collected some other eponym examples, which include a lot of my favourites:

Eponym

A greeble, greeblie or greebly, is the name for the small elements that add detail and scale to models and, often, help make them look more advanced and realistic. Greeble can be both a verb and a noun.

Greeble or greeblie, George Lucas' term, originated on the early Star Wars sets when creating the impressively detailed and realistic models. You can take a simple ship, wall or rooftop, and by adding switches, boxes, cabling, lights and buttons, hey presto, there's a whole lot more technology involved. You can add greebles, or greeblies, to something, or you can greeble it.

A common modelmaking technique for adding elements and greebles to make a design look realistic and sophisticated is to scavenge from existing model kits. Borrowing other parts and repurposing them on a new model is called kit-bashing. Speaking personally, it's also very satisfying making up greebles to add to a LEGO build (MOC—My-Own-Creation)—sometimes the most fun part.

Here's Adam Savage, an ex-Star Wars modelmaker discussing greeblies and kit-bashing (video) or an ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) model shop greeblie (video) used on Star Wars Episode 2. Greebles also make an appearance in the fascinating documentaries about the making of the Star Wars films, Empire of Dreams, and the making of episode 9, The Skywalker Legacy. Sometimes, the making-of is more interesting than what was made. I remember the same feeling watching the making of the Lord of the Rings films, too.

Greeble

An affordance is what someone can do with an object. When you see a well-designed everyday product, the perceived affordances should indicate how to use it.

You shouldn't have to struggle to figure out how to use your shower to take a shower, and you shouldn't have to use trial and error—perhaps drenching yourself in cold water in the process. The design of an everyday thing should make it evident. An object should communicate a good part of how to use it through its affordances.

A recessed button affords pressing it. A sticking-out dial affords twiddling it. A toggle switch affords toggling. An apple affords tossing and catching it; an anvil doesn't. A high stool affords sitting, leaning against or standing on it.

Don Norman, who popularised the term in his classic book The Design of Everyday Things, talked a fair bit about doors. We can push or pull a door or slide it to the side. Sometimes, doors open upwards (though rarely downwards). In something as fundamental to our everyday living as a door, you might think that we had nailed their design sufficiently not to misuse them. However, I'm willing to bet that, like me, you have pulled a door when you needed to push it. A common culprit is adding a bar handle to a door on the side you need to push. While a flat plate attached to the door affords only pushing, a bar handle begs you to pull it. Often, a door designed this way gets a sign saying "Push." As Don Norman says, if your design needs a label, consider another design. 

Once, I nearly walked away from a library with my two small boys because of door confusion. After going through an outer set of glass doors that slid open automatically as we approached them, the next set of glass doors stood resolutely shut. Concluding that the library must be closed, we were just walking out when someone walked up to the second set of glass doors and simply pushed them open. The first set of automatic doors had so cued me that the second set would also be automatic, and the glass doors held no clue that they would operate differently from the outer set that I almost failed to get into an open building.

Don Norman became so well known for pointing out the flaws of everyday objects that poorly designed products became known as "Norman doors."

Don Norman's frustrations are mostly for everyday things. If you are an air traffic controller or an astronaut flying a space shuttle, it's reasonable to expect that some training may be wise to use all the advanced functionality. Yet in specialised environments like healthcare, good design—like avoiding storing drugs in alphabetical order—is critical to reduce the potential for failure.

Digital products struggle to provide affordances. Apple's touchscreen interactions and trackpads have little discoverability of what you can do with them: swipe down from the top-right, swipe up from the bottom, double-tap the side button, long-press on an icon, two-finger swipe right, triple-finger tap—all effectively invisible. Interactions like these reward repeated use and require learning to be effective. However, I think it's reasonable to expect a warm shower in a hotel on your first try without requiring training.

Affordance

The bus factor is how exposed you are if key people, perhaps with critical knowledge or skills, were hit by a bus.

Examples might include the only people able to keep a company running, restore a server from a backup, or someone who held the only key to unlock crypto assets of its customers. As a result, many places are set up with, or required to have by investors or insurers, some redundancy — say two experienced developers with knowledge of how a service works — to minimise the risk of a tragic accident also being a severe problem for a company or its customers.

As a metaphor, the bus factor may be helpful to consider without the need for people to actually be hit by a bus. It may be worth thinking through how you might operate if someone was late, missed their flight, was ill on the day, or simply quit. In operational roles, this will often lead to a minimum of two people for each key position if nothing else to allow one to take a break from time to time.

An alternative framing, with fewer fatalities, is 'what if we all won the lottery?' and so decided to go do something else.

Bus factor

When adding features to a software product it's easy to underestimate the overall time and cost they may take up. To keep the full impact in mind it can be helpful to think of Features As Pets.

When I think of Features As Pets it helps me look past the initial cost of designing and developing a feature and consider its full lifecycle. For example:

you're going to want to tell your users about it

you'll want to check it's being used as intended

you'll need to support it and check that it works in all different places and fix it when it breaks

you may need to work hard to make sure it's compatible with new features you add

you may have to return to the code and refactor it to improve performance

you may need to upgrade libraries and maintain security patches

finally you'll have to decommission it gracefully when it's no longer needed including dealing with data you may have stored

New features are probably one of the key differentiators of your offering compared to others, but it bears a little consideration before adding something — a feature is not just for Christmas.

Features Are Like Pets is from the excellent Intercom on Product Management podcast (Apple, Spotify, ebook).

Features are like pets

Sentences that have been written in a passive voice are generally less powerful than sentences that have been written in an active voice.

Active writing hits harder than passive writing.

It's easy for passive writing to slip in. Here's a handy technique to help you spot passive writing in your sentences. Try adding "...by monkeys" to the end of the sentence. If it still makes sense, then there's a good chance it's passive.

In the example in the sketch: "The bug will be fixed" you can tack on "...by monkeys" and all makes sense. It's passive. Passive writing is an easy way to distance ourselves and our opinions from what we're writing. Active writing takes ownership and responsibility and connects with the reader. "We'll fix the bug. Sorry about that."

I love the "...by monkeys" example for spotting passive writing as it vividly shows how responsibility disappears.

This super example and technique is from Monzo's excellent tone of voice guidelines. Handy for writing copy on the web, for your brand, and for everyday life.

You might like the excellent Hemingway app to spot other non-Hemingway slips in your writing. I ran this post through it and cut out a lot of fluff.

I also love the classic The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

By monkeys

When it comes to innovating, counterintuitively, I think the surest way to produce something new and noteworthy is to start by replicating the work you admire.

If you're making music, first play the music from your favourite artists, then make music like theirs. Only when you've mastered that do you need to go your own way.

If you admire Hemingway, practice writing like him, and your own voice will likely develop by itself.

Before helping develop cubism Picasso was first an accomplished artist.

It's easy to look at the best and think you have to be different. But standing up first makes it easier to stand on the shoulders of giants.

What's more, copying is much lower pressure.

I learned this idea while working at Jump Associates

Replicate then innovate

Forcing functions are a super way to help make things foolproof, or better, errorproof — as all of us make mistakes with designed things without being fools. You may have used your own forcing function when, in an attempt to make sure you remember your passport or tickets before a flight, you put them directly in front of the door so you couldn’t open it without noticing them. That little dialogue that asks you if you want to save your changes before closing your work, that’s a forcing function too.

My first memory of understanding a forcing function was when working with a giant machine capable of cutting through 100 pieces of paper at a time. The two buttons to operate it were on opposite sides of the machine. I couldn’t start the machine without spreading my arms out wide. There was then no way to also accidentally have your fingers in with the paper and near the blades when it started. Smart.

I learned this sense of forcing function from Don Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things. Also from Don, see Mapping.

The other sense of forcing functions for productivity is also really useful: helping kick ourselves into action.

Forcing function — design

Chindogu are inventions that are not really useful yet are not completely without use. They make sense, but you’d never use them. They are also, as a result, often really funny.

This chindogu article gives some great examples while also sharing the 10 tenets of what makes chindogu, chindogu. Things like: there must be the spirit of anarchy —  they represent freedom of thought and action. And they must exist — just the idea isn’t enough; they must be made.

Apparently, the selfie stick was invented as chindogu but failed as people evidently actually found it useful — though you can still see why it might have started as chindogu.

Also see: affordance, forcing function, and more genius from the Japanese: Tsundoku

Chindogu

Unuseless inventions. Invented by the Japanese. Worth a quick chindogu search.

Product design sketches