Alice in Wonderland

Here we come to individuals as the source of phrases we use, knowing the meaning of but having forgotten the origin of…

Many of us, will think of The Queen of Hearts from the Nursery Rhyme of that name:

The Queen of Hearts

She made some tarts,

All on a summer’s day;

The Knave of Hearts

He stole those tarts,

And took them clean away.

The King of Hearts

Called for the tarts,

And beat the knave full sore;

The Knave of Hearts

Brought back the tarts,

And vowed he’d steal no more.

But where did the nursery rhyme draw its inspiration from? At simplest, some believe that the rhyme draws on nothing more than that “hearts” rhymes with “tarts” but a more intriguing answer is that “The Queen of Hearts” was “Elizabeth, daughter of James I. This unfortunate Queen of Bohemia was so called in the Low Countries from her amiable character and engaging manners, even in her lowest estate. (1596-1652)” ¹

Elizabeth had a very eventful life with many ups and downs, – for example, had the gunpowder Plot succeeded in killing her father James I and the protestant hierarchy, Elizabeth was to be placed on the throne of England as a Catholic queen. She was a desirable catch and had many significant suitors, and Frederick (Friedrich) V, Count Palatine of the Rhine was chosen but became very much a love match producing thirteen children over a twenty-year marriage.

Frederic was offered the elected position of King of Bohemia – in part to thwart the reign of Archduke Ferdinand – the previous incumbent, but after just one year, Frederic and his Queen Elizabeth were ousted again by Frederic. You can read a much fuller account of Elizabeth’s life here. Suffice it to say that Elizabeth lived happily in the Hague until, widowed – she returned to England upon the restoration of the Stuarts with the accession of Charles II. So Elizabeth could well have been the model for the Queen of Hearts, although, in the context of Bohemia, she and Frederick were called the Winter King and Queen due to the shortness of their reign and the season of the battle that removed them.

The nursery rhyme The Queen of Hearts famously features in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” where the Queen of Hearts is very unpleasant and whose catchphrase is “Off with their heads!”. The nursery rhyme is presented in evidence in Chapter XI “Who Stole the Tarts?” – a chapter that lampoons the British legal system…

Many people would like to be remembered in perpetuity, but in the case of Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling, he would probably have preferred not to become a byword for traitor. Rather, he would have liked to be remembered for his attempts to combine Christian thought with contemporary physics to produce a “new world religion.” Universism. Unfortunately, he strayed down the path of Nordic racial superiority (he was Norwegian) and fell under the spell of Hitler facilitating the Nazi invasion of Norway and temporarily being placed in charge… Go here for a fuller account.

There are many other people whose names have become Eponyms,

• Louis Pasteur – Pasteurisation,
• Lord Cardigan – Cardigans obs!,
• 4^th Earl of Sandwich – Sandwiches, a surprisingly late invention…
• Hoover and now  Dyson brand names that became eponymous,
• Boycott – a beastly Estate Manager who caused his tenants to stop harvesting and paying him, and local shops to refuse to serve him
•  Adolphe Sax – inventor of the Saxophone,
• Dahlia, after Anders Dahl, an 18th-century Swedish botanist
• Bloomers, after Amelia Bloomer, a campaigner for women’s suffrage
• Franz Anton Mesmer, who gives us Mesmerise (hypnotise)

You can find more here…

There are no Cant Languages beginning with “Q” in the Wikipedia article on that subject.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/s/famous-names-inspired-common-words/#whats-an-eponym