Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that is made up of words.

I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me is:

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned superhero names and porn star names are basically the same thing: a bad description of whatever skills or oddities you’re famous for… Did I mention we’re doing a review of Justice League: Snyder Cut for patrons? No. Well we are… all 9000 sections of it.

Wicked words

This week when I was delving into the internet I found myself on the topic of words again. There seems to be no dearth of information on etymology and word origins and for some reason I am absolutely fascinated with it. So today I bring interesting words, and many you know, that all have roots in a person’s name. If you remember our quiz from last year and I mentioned Gerrymandering, from Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814). The shape of one of the voting districts suggested the body of a salamander, prompting a staffer at the Boston Gazette to coin the word Gerrymander. There are loads of words out there named for people, so let’s take a look at some interesting origins.

The Irish invented boycotting because of the English. This all started in 1880 when Charles Stewart Parnell, whom I had never heard of but was a pretty popular Irish member of Parliament, decided that the English Government had failed them in their time of need and that they must seize control of their own destiny. This was not long after the terrible potato famine, BTW. Parnell was the son of a Protestant landowner who organised the rural masses into agitation against the ruling Landlord class, the Brits mostly, to seek the 3 Fs: Fixity of Tenure, Freedom to Sell and Fair Rent. Something that was incredibly lacking at the time and because of the terrible conditions and the rising rent many Irish were forced out of their homes onto the streets. Before this in 1870, landlords, many of them absentee, owned 80% of all the land of Ireland, while 50% of tenants occupied holdings of less than fifteen acres; more than three quarters of all holdings were annual tenancies.

During this the “hero” or our story, Charles Cunningham Boycott comes to town. Boycott was an English land agent working for Lord Erne, a major landowner in the Lough Mask area of County Mayo who lived off the exorbitant rents he charged tenants. Boycott, you see, was a former army officer and had served in the British Army 39th Regiment, which brought him to Ireland. After retiring from the army he threw his lot in with Lord Erne and took pleasure in the many bloody evictions that were to come.

Boycott got right to work, evicting many tenants for not paying/being able to afford rent and quickly the ire for him grew. As new Irish laws were passed in hopes of lowering rent and making it easier to exist while Irish, Boycott kept working. Soon his tale of evictions would come to a head when Boycott set about evicting 11 tenants the locals had had enough. The Mayo branch of the Irish Land League urged Boycott's employees to withdraw their labor and began a campaign of isolation against Boycott in the local community. This campaign included shops in nearby Ballinrobe refusing to serve him, and the withdrawal of services. Boycott found himself a marked man, not fearing violence but even worse the scorn, silence, and disdain of simply everyone he encountered.

Furious, he made a fatal mistake by informing the all-powerful London media of his plight. The campaign against Boycott became a huge issue in the British press after he wrote the following letter to The Times.

“Sir, The following detail may be interesting to your readers as exemplifying the power of the Land League. On the 22nd September a process-server, escorted by a police force of seventeen men, retreated to my house for protection, followed by a howling mob of people,