Just who was this Ponzi, anyway?

'Ponzi scheme." Thanks to Tom Petters and Bernard Madoff, that phrase is too much with us these days -- even though most of us don't know who the heck Ponzi was, or whether he was even a schemer.

It's the latest catchphrase gaining widespread use even though its namesake might be long forgotten. Think Alzheimer's disease or Melba toast or Ferris wheel.

"So often with these phrases, there is no mystery except that people forget who the titular hero was," said Anatoly Liberman, a University of Minnesota language professor. Being a student of history, Liberman had learned about Charles Ponzi, who was indeed a schemer, an Italian immigrant whose early-20th-century bilking led to his surname being attached to what previously had been known as a pyramid scheme. "So many of our phrases like this are associated with scandals," Liberman noted.

But many catchphrases bearing a person's name, called eponymns, came about as tributes. Everything from lab burners (Robert Bunsen) to library filing systems (Melvil Dewey), from seismic readings (Charles Richter) to fitness methods (Joseph Pilates, a onetime circus performer), contains the name of a long-forgotten creator. In 1892 a Pittsburgh bridge-builder with a great handle -- George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. -- concocted an amusement-park ride that still lights up our lives.

Sometimes, the linguistic route is more circuitous. In 1843, Christian Andreas Doppler made groundbreaking observations on light and sound waves. A century and a half later, it became impossible to turn on a weather report and not hear about the radar system named for the "Doppler effect."

Many eponyms hark back much farther, including Adam's apple (the first man and his forbidden fruit) and Achilles' heel (after the mythological Greek hero and the injury that felled him).

On a tragic note, some phrases drew their names from victims: Megan's Law and the Amber Alert came about because of the kidnapping and murder of young girls with those names. Since baseball superstar Lou Gehrig's death, the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has more commonly borne his name.

On the other hand, Alois Alzheimer, James Parkinson and Thomas Hodgkin made early diagnoses of the illnesses that are now eponyms.

Food names often are a paean to the chef's friend (bananas Foster, after a friend of the Brennan family in New Orleans) or a famous fan (beef Wellington after the Duke; oysters Rockefeller after John D.). That category even has a who'd-a-thunk-it Opera Division: Chicken Tetrazzini and Melba toast were "titled" for a pair of beloved sopranos, Luisa Tetrazzini and Nellie Melba.

Weapons might bear the brand of the person who invented it -- the Gatling gun (Dr. Richard J. Gatling) -- or the one who popularized it -- the Bowie knife (after Jim Bowie, but created by James Black). However, the Molotov cocktail was named after a Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov; its creator is unknown. A better-known arms maker, Alfred Nobel, wished to be known less as the inventor of dynamite than as the man who funded prizes for peaceful and creative forces.

Blessedly, for Nobel's legacy at least, no one who pulled off a Ponzi scheme has ever won the Nobel Prize for economics. At least as far as we know.

Bill Ward • 612-673-7643