A test of metal – Frank McNally on the mysteries of the eponymous adjective

One of the lesser insights I derived from reading that new book about James Clarence Mangan, mentioned yesterday, is that he must be the only poet whose eponymous adjective is also the name of a scientific element.
As coined by Bridget Hourican, at least, Mangan’s personality and writing style is called “Manganese”. So is the substance at number 25 in the periodic table of the elements.
Chemical Manganese was first isolated in 1770s, probably in a laboratory in Sweden. The literary variety was discovered about 40 years later, in Dublin, somewhere around the top of Fishamble Street, where the poet’s father had a pub.
Manganese the metal and Manganese the poetry style have little else in common. But the metal, while hard, is very brittle, a quality it may have shared with the writer. It also “tarnishes slowly in air”. As did poor Mangan, an unstable element at the best of times.
The air of 1840s Dublin certainly didn’t agree with him, nor the water either. An opium addict by 1849, he was found one day in a “wretched hovel” on the same Fishamble Street, “in a state of misery and squalor”, by a passing Dr William Wilde.
Mangan died of cholera soon afterwards.
I suspect the previously standard adjective for Mangan, by the usual rule of these things, was “Manganesque”. But Manganese is so much better it will surely stick now. Besides which, I’m not sure there are any rules for such words, beyond what sounds right.
There is of course a Wikipedia page listing all the known eponymous adjectives. They typically involve just adding “an” (eg Wildean), “ic” (Homeric), “ist” (Stalinist) or “ite” (Thatcherite) to the end of the name.
But as with verbs, there are also a few irregular ones, mostly (it seems) to do with the inability of the dominant English accent to pronounce certain sounds.
At least I used to assume that was why the literary style of Evelyn Waugh – whose surname many English people would have us believe sounds exactly the same as “war” – has become known as “Wavian”.
Or similarly, that we must use “Shavian” to describe things pertaining to our own George Bernard Shaw. But then again, it seems it was Shaw who started this habit, and that it’s based on a Latin joke.
As Nicholas Grene explained in a letter to this page some years ago, Shaw told his early biographer Hesketh Pearson that the adjective arose when somebody found a medieval manuscript by another Shaw with the marginal comment: “Sic Shavius, sed inepte” (“thus Shaw, but badly”).
Somewhat in the manner of the French impressionists, GBS duly adopted the insult as his personal descriptor and it became a rule.
By the same logic, I suppose, the work of the second-most-famous Irishman named Joyce – William, aka Lord Haw Haw – must, with ‘Joycean’ already taken, be called “Haw-Havian”.
But why Charles, as in the name of the king, should become “Carolingian” rather than Carolinean, I’m not sure.
And then there is maudlin, another weird English phenomenon, which (as may be forgotten except by people who went to the Oxford college of that pronunciation) is also an eponymous adjective.
Meaning “stupidly sentimental”, it derives from Mary Magdalene – she also of the infamous laundries, not pronounced “maudlin”. Who, according to my Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, “is drawn by ancient painters with a lackadaisical face, and eyes swollen with weeping”.
Some eponymous adjectives could simply not be other than they are.
You can almost hear Alanis Morisette, for example, singing: “Isn’t it Byronic?” (and failing to find correct examples to fit her question).
Conversely, from the Wikipedia list, “Eliotic” for TS Eliot sounds somehow wrong. This must be because the suffix “otic” seems to attach itself to an inordinate number of conditions suggesting personality disorder: eg chaotic, despotic, idiotic, psychotic, robotic, etc.
An obvious omission from the list is Jack Kerouac, whose Breton name does not easily adapt to one of the standard endings. It wouldn’t necessarily fit with his style, I know, but just for the fun of it, I propose Kerouacky.
Getting back to the Periodic Table, the nearest thing Mangan may have to an Irish rival of any profession is George Berkeley: bishop, philosopher, and occasional slave owner.
He is accidentally commemorated by Berkelium (No 97 in the periodic table of the elements), named for the laboratory where it was discovered, located in the hills of the eponymous Californian city, whose founding fathers were inspired by the bishop’s line: “westward the course of empire takes its way.”
But the adjective from Berkeley is “Berkeleyan”, so Manganese still stands alone. The closest I can find to it elsewhere is a compound verb rather than an adjective. At number five on the table, that one may be applicable to writers, politicians, pub philosophers, and perhaps even the occasional newspaper columnist, who can Boron all day and night.