That a retiree of either gender has both the right and the need for new pursuits, disinterested and enjoyable, is now taken for granted: there are tour operators, resorts, and hotels that cater exclusively to the elderly. For the elderly who choose to resist such disguised exploitation, or who lack the resources to enjoy it, let me suggest a household activity that I have enjoyed, that entails no risk, costs practically nothing, and is within reach of one and all. All you need is a dictionary; it involves searching for those common nouns that were originally proper nouns, names of people that over time, for whatever reason, have lost their capitalization. But for the discovery to be considered fair it is important that, in the mind of the player, the original proper noun has long since been erased, overlaid by the final common noun. In short, this game amounts to going lower-case hunting, much as you might go mushroom hunting.
I’ll explain with an example. While reading a novel whose title I’ve forgotten, I happened on the Italian word siluetta, condemned by purists as a needless Gallicism, and a word I’d probably encountered countless times before without experiencing either curiosity or symptoms of intolerance. The purists suggest replacing it with model, profile, outline, figure; I’m no purist, and if the occasion presents itself, or if I find the occasion through some effort of my own, I will happily write siluetta, or even go back to the original French word, silhouette, because it’s one I especially like. It’s a painterly word: it’s slight and light, tapered (perhaps because I subconsciously associate it with siluro, “torpedo,” or with the French sillon, meaning “groove” or “furrow”?), and it has the distinct appearance of a graceful feminine diminutive, perfect for describing the body of a teenage swimmer standing out against the sky, for instance, as she dives from a board. But a diminutive of what?
A diminutive of nothing. It is not a diminutive, it is feminine only in appearance, it has nothing to do with either siluro or sillon, and the lower-case first letter is an artifact. In any old Larousse you can find the true story of Étienne de Silhouette, of Limoges, the controller general of the sadly ruinous French public finances in 1759. It appears that he had the best of intentions but was heavy-handed. Obsessed with austerity, he issued decrees that were so hasty and bizarre that he quickly became unpopular, and in fact the king relieved him of his position just a few months after appointing him to it, perhaps in part because the reckless functionary had gone so far as to propose that the perquisites of the royal family be reduced. He was pilloried by the satirical broadsheets, and jokes, proverbs, and figures of speech circulated at his expense.
It started with describing as “à la Silhouette” any decree that was half baked, clumsy, or foolish; then the term came to designate anything poorly suited to its function or designed too emphatically on the cheap, and in particular portraits reduced to mere outline were said to have been done “à la Silhouette.” In time, the outline itself came to be called a silhouette, and it was via this lengthy path, with the capital letter of his name lost to posterity, that the inspector went down in history, paradoxically not in spite of his wrongheadedness but precisely by virtue of it. All the same, there can be no doubt that, had his name been less elegant, this evolution would have had a different outcome or ended sooner. This is not the only case in which a lower-case letter perpetuates a poor reputation: the term “quisling” is used these days for someone who collaborates with the oppressor of his country by offering to serve as governor, and it will continue to be so employed long after Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian traitor in the Second World War, has been forgotten.
As a rule, however, the initial capital letter is a tribute to the virtues or the ingenuity of the possessor of the name. The Maecenases of every time and place have kept alive for nearly two millennia the renown of Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, the learned friend of Horace and Virgil. For housewives everywhere on earth, the name of Justus von Liebig, a famous and versatile German chemist, is linked to the beef bouillon cube with which his name has become virtually synonymous: a liebig is a common noun for an everyday object. The fact is not without irony: Liebig was a pioneer in all fields of pure and applied chemistry; he is certainly one of the founding fathers of modern chemistry; and yet his name is inextricably linked to his one successful commercial undertaking, which might rather be called speculative, for in reality what is needed to obtain beef extract is capital rather than knowledge or a spirit of invention.
For that matter, the handbooks for my previous profession teem with nouns that were once proper and have now become common, or used as common nouns: the Kipp generator, the Bunsen burner, the Buchner funnel, the Soxhlet extractor—clever objects developed in the chemical laboratories of the nineteenth century, which enjoy the decorous semi-eternity that was denied their inventors. Who still remembers Professor Soxhlet, the Moravian chemist, physician, and philosopher? He has been nothing but ashes for more than half a century, but the brilliant extractor he invented (the “Soxhlet”) still works away in laboratories everywhere, with that slow, intermittent, and silent rhythm that makes it so similar to an organ in our bodies.
I felt, as I mentioned above, the giddy thrill of a mushroom hunter who finds a handsome porcini when I learned that derricks—that is, those metallic latticework structures that are used to drill into the earth to find and extract petroleum—take their name from a Mister Derryck, a hangman in sixteenth-century London: he loved his work, and invented a new model of gallows, latticed, tall and slender, that was clearly visible from a distance. This chance discovery so fascinated me that, in one of my books, I constructed a story around it. The case is significantly parallel to that of the guillotine, invented by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, that of the chassepot rifle, and many others: in every era the tools for killing tend to be updated and improved. Another fine mushroom, albeit more evanescent than the other ones mentioned here, is the Marie of the bain-marie: it is said that the inventor of the bain-marie was the first alchemist in history, none other than Mary, or Miriam, Moses’ prophetess sister.
Few Frenchmen know that la poubelle, the word for trash can, immortalizes the name of a Monsieur Poubelle, the prefect who invented it, in the nineteenth century. In Italy, a certain kind of extension ladder, mounted on a trailer and made up of telescoping sections that can be deployed one after another by use of a winch, is called a scala-porta (ladder-gate, ladder-door) or even, oddly enough, vedova-porta (widow-gate, widow-door). These names have nothing to do with the fact that the ladder is portable (as porta-ladder might suggest), but instead commemorate (or were meant to commemorate) the Signor Porta who invented it, a century ago, and his widow, who long held the patent; but, in this case as well, if fate had chosen to assign Signor Porta a less strangely fitting surname, he might never have had the luck to lose his capital letter, and in all likelihood the ladder he invented would have been given a polysyllabic pseudo-Greek name, such as the periplanetic ladder or the anaptyctic ladder.