GUPPIES IN TUXEDOS: Funny Eponyms

Another entertaining, mind-stimulating book about words from Terban (Mad As a Wet Hen!; and Eight Ate). As he explains, an eponym is a person (or place) whose name becomes a word (referred to as ""eponymous""). Organizing by categories, he gives brief anecdotes on celebrities, inventors, and innocent bystanders--both familiar and unfamiliar--whose names are memorialized in food, clothes, cars, the calendar, miscellaneous things (some of them brand names) and such crowd-pleasers as ""five bad guys (hooligan, hoodlum, thug, vandal and scrooge), one good guy (bobby). . .and a maverick""--almost a hundred in all. Maestro's cheerfully imaginative drawings, sparked with tangerine, add to the fun with verbal-visual puns (relevant, like ""Pen [n] s' Woods,"" and irrelevant, like ""springs in the air""). Index, bibliography.