A New Political Eponym Barges in : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

This time last year, David Letterman was making jokes about Blagojeviching, playing on the name of disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Now we've got a brand-new political eponym on our hands: Salahi is being used as a verb meaning "to gate-crash an official event."

The new word of course refers to Virginia couple Tareq and Michaele Salahi, who showed up uninvited to President Obama's state dinner in honor of the Indian Prime Minister last month. The scandal over the event's lax security has been dubbed Crashergate or Gatecrashergate. Now Politico reports that Salahi is making the rounds as a playful verb, as in this line from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: "The White House failure to stop the Salahis from Salahing their way past security checkpoints will leave people smirking for a while."

Blagojeviching didn't end up sticking around in the political lexicon, perhaps because it's just too hard to say. Salahi is a shorter name, but it might not lend itself well to verbifying either: is it Salahing, as Dowd has it, or Salahi-ing, as in Politico's quote from event planner Kelley McCormick, "Many of us have witnessed highly advanced Salahi-ing over the years"?

Either way, it's noticeable that Salahi is getting used as an active verb rather than a passive one. Political eponyms very often take the passive form of get X-ed, as in get Borked, meaning "to suffer a similar fate as that of Robert Bork," whose nomination to the Supreme Court was torpedoed in 1987. Other Supreme Court nominees have been eponymized since then, as in "Miered" (after George W. Bush's failed nominee Harriet Miers) and most recently, "Sotomayored" (after Obama's successful nominee Sonia Sotomayor).

Passive political eponyms of the Borked variety have also been used to refer to a political candidate getting targeted by outside groups. Thus when South Dakota Senator (and Senate Majority Leader) Tom Daschle went down to defeat to John Thune in 2004, pundits spoke of "getting Daschled." Similarly, when moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava faced opposition this past year from conservative candidate Doug Hoffman in an upstate New York congressional race, Democrats said that she "got Scozzafava-ed." (Like Blagojevich, Scozzafava might be a little too polysyllabic to have staying power as an eponym.)

The Salahis, by audaciously taking matters into their own hands at the state dinner, have asserted a more active role in their eponymization. "To Salahi one's way (into an event)" puts the neologism into the same category as such pushy verbs as bulldoze, strong-arm, and, of course, gate-crash (a back-formation from the noun gate-crasher).

Do you think the verb Salahi has legs, or is it yet another flash in the pan like so many fleeting eponyms before it? Have we already lost interest in Gatecrashergate, moving on to more salacious stories like the Tiger Woods saga? Sound off in the comments below — and let us know about any other eponyms you've heard this past year.

Vocabulary, Politics, Words

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Ben Zimmer is language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and former language columnist for The Boston Globe and The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition to his regular "Word Routes" column here, he contributes to the group weblog Language Log. He is also the chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. Click here to read more articles by Ben Zimmer.