I was rather annoyed by this passage I read (emphasis added).

… much of the blame [for the fall of the Roman Empire] may fall less on Spenglerian fatigue than on the poor judgment of one man, the emperor Valens, who squandered an army in a battle that he should have avoided or delayed.
– Robert Cowley, What If?

I didn't understand the emphasized part, but google revealed and explained it as a reference to the theories of Oswald Spengler. But still, why did the author have to make it difficult for me-as-reader? As he wrote this was he smugly thinking, "Ha! I am erudite enough to know what this means, but you aren't."

My question though: Would you say that "Spenglerian" is an eponym, or simply a cultural reference? More importantly, how do you distinguish between the two?

It's possible, but historians, like other academics, tend to use shorthand notations like this all the time. When I first ran across the term objective correlative in some piece of lit crit, I didn't have the foggiest notion what it meant. When I finally tracked it down, I found that it had been used once in an essay by T S Elliot: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." From what I remember, vaguely, of Oswald Spengler, and his oeuvre, he had great civilizations go through cycles of rise and fall (or am I confusing The Decline of the West with Vico's eternal return?). His book was published just after Germany had lost World War I. I guess, to me, it seems a kind of academic-literary trope: Xian Y, e.g., Sartrean nausia, Cartesian cogito, etc. How is any metaphor not cultural?

So, do you think the author just coined the phrase? Doesn't that make it an eponym, since it was published and it is clearly based on the name of a person?

I don't know. I think of eponyms as nouns, and this is the adjectival form of the professor name.

quote:

Originally posted by zmjezhd: I think of eponyms as nouns

I suppose they usually are.

But not always, it seems. Looking over the wordcraft eponyms list, I found Alice-in-Wonderland (= illusory; unreal), Anacreontic, Anteaen, Apician, apollonian, argyle and augean, just in the A's.

Looking over the wordcraft eponyms list

So, it's eponymous, then.

Z, you may misunderstand me. I'm saying that it's not disqualified simply because it's adjectival. But that still leaves the question: when does such a term become a "word" (and an eponym at that) rather than just a reference to Spengler?

quote:

when does such a term become a "word" (and an eponym at that) rather than just a reference to Spengler?

Now, I'm confused. What's the difference between a term and a word? Are not proper names words? I once saw a blurb on a video package that said that the movie it contained was "The Citizen Kane of drunken clown movies." It seemed appropriate and funny. It seems that as long as you and whomever you're speaking to know about Spengler, or have a vague idea of who he was, it works. I would say that eponym is not a grammatical category like noun or verb, but a way for lexicographers to sort and catalog words.

I guess it comes down to our old question, "What is a word, as distinguished from a mere collection of letters or sounds that, at least as yet, can't be considered a word?"

I know you'd agree that there's such a think as a non-word! Think e-word, for example.

An old story of witty created-on-the spot -nyms.

Joseph Choate once opposed an attorney from wealthy Westchester County, north of New York City. The attorney, in an attempt to belittle Choate, warned the jury not to be taken in by his colleague's "Chesterfieldian urbanity."

Choate, in turn, urged the jury not to be taken in by his opponent's "Westchesterfieldian suburbanity."