Here is my letter in today's New York Times Book Review:
To the Editor:
In his excellent review of Evan Thomas’s “First,” Jeffrey Toobin repeats Justice O’Connor’s self-description as “the Yenta of Paradise Valley,” which was intended as a reference to her matchmaking skills.
The quote and sentiment are no doubt accurate, but the Yiddish is not. Although Yenta was the name of the matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof,” it actually means “busybody” or “gossip.” As any Yiddish speaker would explain, a matchmaker is a “shadkhn.”
Joseph Stein was obviously being playful when he wrote the script for “Fiddler.” Over time, it appears that “yenta” has come to stand for the character’s attributes, not unlike Dickens’s Scrooge, though with the opposite effect.
STEVEN LUBET
CHICAGO
The writer is director of the Bartlit Center for Trial Advocacy at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.
There are other fictional characters whose names have become eponyms: Robin Hood, Pollyanna, Don Juan, Cinderella, Jekyll & Hyde. What are some others (nouns, not adjectives, so excluding Quixotic or Falstaffian, for example)?
Chicken Little
Romeo. And Juliet.
Prince Hamlet (for someone who waffles, which makes you wonder why he was Danish, a different breakfast delicacy altogether, rather than Belgian)
Helen (of Troy)
Superman
Thanks, Bernie. Keep 'em coming.
Grinch.
Rambo. This is fun.
In the spirit of Grinch, Scrooge.
Yes, Rambo is a good one (Scrooge is in my letter).
Some of these are better than others. The test is whether you would describe someone as "such a __________." Thus, he or she is "such a Rambo" works very well. Or "don't be a grinch." Helen of Troy and Hamlet don't work quite as well, I think, as they are more likely to come up as similes: "He was like Hamlet," rather than "His is a Hamlet."
Sorry, you're right; Scrooge was in your letter. And I'll give you that Hamlet and Helen are used more often as similes than metaphors, but I've heard the admonition more than once that "there's no more time to play Hamlet," or the like.
Here's another–the Good Samaritan.
More of an aside with some family resemblance to the post (so don’t let me interrupt the fun): I became rather intrigued by the Yiddish words and phrases that regularly appear in The Rockford Files, my habitual viewing of which is analogous (although more conscious than unconscious in orientation) to the “repetition compulsion” in psychoanalysis. Indeed, it prompted me to buy a couple of works on Yiddish (including, of course, a Yiddish/English dictionary … well, ‘slangs and idioms’), as I did not always know the meaning of the words. I still plan on tediously documenting their use in virtually every episode (not unlike my newfound obsession with the classic Champagne Metallic 1963 Thunderbird Landau with white vinyl roof that shows up in most episodes as well, usually parked, but on occasion driven and once in an accident!); an idiosyncratic form of escapism from everyday anxieties, ugliness, pain, suffering, disappointment, absurdity, and nonsense, what have you. This of course allows one to make an inference or two some about the writers for the series, most of whom are first-rate in my judgment, right up there with those who wrote for M*A*S*H, which finds the humane and brilliant psychiatrist Dr. Sidney Freedman (Major) (played by the late Allan Franklin Arbus) uttering Yiddish words and phrases on occasion as well. Incidentally, my personal interest in Yiddish first arose as a result of reading about the history of Marxism in the U.S. from Paul Buhle, as many of early newspapers and periodicals of the communists and socialists were of course published in Yiddish. Later, I became fascinated by the remnants of the Jewish Labour Bund, the anti-Zionist and socialist Bund movement from Poland who still wrote and conversed in Yiddish, now living in Israel (at this date, virtually all of them have died). (I wrote about this here: https://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2017/10/not-all-jews-in-israel-are-zionists.html)
Here is the link I made above sans the closed parenthesis (so it should work): https://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2017/10/not-all-jews-in-israel-are-zionists.html
Job.
Frankenstein (?)
Frankenstein is sort of a double: First, the scientist's name becomes the name of the monster; then the monster's name becomes an eponym.