People who gave their names to things: stories behind the words 'boycott' and 'hooligan'.

Sometimes the name of a real person becomes the name of a thing, a place or an invention. The person gets forgotten but his name enters our day-to-day vocabulary describing something we cannot really do without. Who, for example, remembers James Thomas Brudenell, seventh Earl of Cardigan? Yet, when winter comes, most of us like to wear woolen knitted jackets that the seventh Earl of Cardigan designed and made popular.

Whose names brought the words 'boycott' and 'hooligan' into existence? Read our post to find it out.

Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was an estate manager running the lands of Lord Erne in County Mayo, Ireland. His reponsibilities included collecting rent from the farmers who worked Lord Erne's land. He showed no mercy for those farmers who had no money to pay rent because of bad harvests. He was not to be persuaded to reduce rent payments or let them pay later. His only response to them was: If you cannot pay, give up the land. 

As a result of his harsh treatment of farmers, the local community turned on Charles Boycott. Local shops sold him nothing. Organized marauders blocked his mail and food supplies and destroyed his property. In the end, having lost almost everything, the captain left Ireland never to work there again. In modern English his name is used to describe the form of protest which the Irish people chose to drive Charles Boycott out of the country: refusing to help him in any way, leaving him without the things he needed.

In the 1890s an unruly Irish family - the Hooligans- is said to have lived in Southwark, a district of central London. They ignored all moral norms of behavior and were a public nuisance. Steet brawling, robbery, drinking to exceess were sufficient reasons for the Hooligans to make their way into police reports. One of the Hooligans, Patrick, was particularly notorious. 

Suprisingly, the name of those ruffians caught public fancy and it became a byword for unruly behaviour in popular music-hall songs and cartoons. Musicians, composers, comedians started to use the word 'hooligan' so often that it soon became forgotten that there had ever been such a family and now some reference books describe the Hooligans as a fictional Irish family, others claim that the Hooligans existed. 

Whether the Hooligans existed or not, the word which was brought into existence by them is still widely used, particularly to describe football hooligans who are noisy and violent. Moreover, the word 'hooligan' was borrowed from English by other languages, for example, by Russian (хулиган), French (hooligan) and Spanish (hooligan)

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