A Word A Day — Byronic

with Anu Garg
Photo Credit: Wikipedia

“Proper names that have become improper and uncommonly common” is how the author Willard R. Espy described eponyms, and that is the theme for this week’s words in AWAD: words coined after people’s names.

We are going to meet a poet, a novelist, a prophet, a statesman, and a legislator. They wrote poems, novels, holy books, political treatises, and laws.

In our quest for eponyms, we are going to visit England, Persia, Italy, and Greece. All aboard!

Byronic

(by-RON-ik)

adjective: One who is melancholic, passionate, and melodramatic, and disregards societal norms.

After poet Lord Byron (1788-1824), who displayed such characteristics, as did his poetry, i.e. a flawed character marked by great passion who exhibits disrespect for social institutions and is self-destructive.

A little-known fact: He was the father of Ada Lovelace, today known as the first computer programmer, who wrote programs for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine.

“Zenovich casts [movie director Roman] Polanski, whose face repeatedly fills the screen with a Byronic luminosity, as a tragic figure, a child survivor of the Holocaust haunted by the murder of his wife, the actress Sharon Tate, at the hands of the Manson family.”
Bill Wyman; Whitewashing Roman Polanski; Salon (New York); Feb 19, 2009.

“Laurie may have his pet theories as to why [Gregory] House-the-character has become a cult — the damaged, Byronic genius/healer who can say the unsayable and (almost always) get away with it.”
Stuart Husband; Hugh Laurie Interview; The Daily Telegraph (London, UK); Jun 3, 2009.

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts. -Khalil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)