NEW YORK:   Five minutes' walk from United Nations headquarters in New York there used to sit an Italian restaurant called Paparazzi. The name had a jaunty Roman insouciance. But business began dropping off after Princess Diana's tragic accident. After all, who wants to eat in a place named after the flashbulb-popping rats said to have hounded Saint Di to her death? The owner was left with no choice but to rebaptize his eatery.

When he first labeled the place in the 1970s, "Paparazzi" had raffishly positive connotations. It derived from Paparazzo, the name of a pavement photographer in Federico Fellini's 1960 classic movie "La Dolce Vita." The film became a hit, the characters acquired cult status and the fictional photographer's name became synonymous with his tribe. Soon the ardent celebrity-hunting camera-wielders of Europe were all called by the Italian plural form of his name.

The English language is full of such instances of people becoming words. An unprincipled and dangerous schemer might be called Machiavellian - a reference to a more venerable Italian, the Florentine political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose book "The Prince" describes how to acquire, wield and maintain power ruthlessly and amorally.

If you refused to deal with such a person, you might boycott him - which is what happened to a British land agent in Ireland, Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832-1897), who was the first victim of a campaign of ostracism begun by the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stuart Parnell in 1880. (It worked: Boycott left Ireland within a year, and new land tenure legislation was passed.)

Boycotting someone is, of course, a good deal better than lynching him, a habit of the Virginia vigilante Captain William Lynch (1742-1820), who was notorious for taking the law into his own hands.

A slower death can be had by consuming nicotine, the poisonous alkaloid that seeps from the tobacco plant and stains the fingers, teeth and lungs of smokers. Tobacco was introduced to France by Jean Nicot (1530-1600), who died expecting to be remembered for an entire dictionary - the first French dictionary, on which he labored throughout his life - rather than for one entry in it.

Dictionaries are of little use when texts are bowdlerized, or sanitized for general consumption, a practice initiated by Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825). He expurgated Shakespeare by censoring words "which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family."

Bowdler was proud of the actions that made his name. However, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814) spent the last two decades of his life trying to have his patronymic detached from the infamous instrument of beheading used in the French Revolution. Guillotin neither invented the guillotine nor was a victim of it, but made the speech in the National Assembly that led to its adoption as France's favored means of execution.

There are many other examples of such eponyms entering the language. Often these honor inventors: The diesel engine was made by Rudolph Diesel (1858-1913), and used to power the less-successful zeppelin dirigible invented by Count von Zeppelin (1838-1917); the sandwich was concocted by the fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792), an inveterate gambler who didn't want to leave the card-table for his dinner.

More often, items of apparel bear the names of those who made or wore them. The woolen cardigan was donned in the cold Crimean campaign by the seventh Earl of Cardigan (1797-1868), a British general, just as Wellington boots were worn on wet and muddy battlefields by soldiers under the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852). Leotards were devised by the 19th century French acrobat Jules Léotard and bloomers were sported by the pants-wearing suffragette Amelia Bloomer.

The tyranny of popular parlance, however, literally means that your name ceases to be your own. After Dr. Guillotin died, his family pleaded with the French government to change the name of the hated decapitating machine, but in vain. They ended up changing their own names.

Shashi Tharoor's most recent novel is "Riot."

Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune