xxviii, 280; $150 cloth), edited by Julio Segura and Carlos Rodriguez Braun, which provides detailed definitions and explanations for more than three hundred eponymic expressions commonly used in economics--surely more than enough to tax anyone's memory.
What, for instance, are economists' eponymic propensities regarding the technical designations (theorem, hypothesis, law, and so forth) they attach to people's names when coining eponymic expressions?
The word dictum is associated with a special class of eponymic expressions that are not infrequent in economics, and I was disappointed to find that in this book they appear hardly at all.
Although the dictionary is ostensibly devoted to eponymic expressions that denote scientific concepts (as the subtitle implies), in practice the editors interpret their subject more broadly, which explains the inclusion of two items that would otherwise seem out of place: "Cowles Commission" and "Palgrave's dictionaries." (6) Two other items that might have been included under this broader interpretation of economic eponymy are "Bonar's catalog" (Bonar 1932), which would have been welcomed by Smithian scholars with an antiquarian bent (though it might have mystified some of our econometric brethren), and the "Summers-Heston database" (Summers and Heston 1991), which had a tremendous impact on applied work and transformed the study of economic growth in recent decades.
I must confess that I was only marginally successful, and they actually do seem to have listed most of the eponymic expressions used in our profession.
This item has considerable eponymic interest, for several reasons:
It exemplifies a special kind of eponymic expression in which the eponym's name (James Tobin in this case) is actually incorporated into the technical word for the concept itself.
It is not often that we can pinpoint the exact moment at which a particular eponymic expression was introduced.
(1.) In Annals of Mathematics, for instance, the titles of most papers carry at least one eponymic expression (and often two or three), and if the title does not, the abstract almost surely will.