Having just sent the title<\/p>\n
\nErd\u00f6s-K\u00e1c, R\u00e9nyi-Tur\u00e1n, Keating-Snaith, and Katz-Sarnak\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
for a lecture at a forthcoming conference, I was naturally led to wonder about the marvelous English expression name-dropping<\/i>, and I resorted to the OED<\/a> for information. I was surprised to see that the word is claimed to go back no further than the 1940’s; in fact the first quotation is for name-dropper<\/i>:<\/p>\n
\n1939 Los Angeles Times 17 Jan. 115\/5<\/b> My pet aversion..is the name dropper, the type that is always saying: \u2018Well,..when I had lunch with the P. of W., he said-\u2019 I say to them: \u2018The P. of What?\u2019 \u2018The P. of W., the Prince of Wales, of course,\u2019 they say.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The first instance of name-dropping<\/i> is in 1945; a nice quotation from 1999 is<\/p>\n
\n1999 Times 16 July 24\/7<\/b> Name-dropping is so vulgar, as I was telling the Queen last week.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Considering that the phenomenon certainly goes back to the dawns of celebrity (there must have been some name-droppers in philosophical circles in Ancient Greece), it’s a surprise to see it acquire its specific name so recently. And most languages probably don’t even have a good equivalent; I would certainly be hard put to give a good translation of name-dropping<\/i> in French. Are there other languages better suited to the task?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Having just sent the title Erd\u00f6s-K\u00e1c, R\u00e9nyi-Tur\u00e1n, Keating-Snaith, and Katz-Sarnak for a lecture at a forthcoming conference, I was naturally led to wonder about the marvelous English expression name-dropping, and I resorted to the OED for information. I was surprised to see that the word is claimed to go back no further than the 1940’s; … Continue reading Name-dropping<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[362,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-blogroll"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}