As I read through this perfectly innocuous book by Morton Freeman, I found it hard to believe that it was written as recently as 1997. One might be forgiven for thinking the publication date was a century earlier. This impression is a consequence of Mr Freeman's particular selection of entries and is bolstered by a certain claustrophobic quality in his prose, that evokes the mustiness of an Edwardian gentleman-scholar's library.

Second-guessing an author's selection criteria is, of course, a little unfair, but what's a reviewer to do? For a book like this, where the huge number of potential candidates for inclusion forces the author to make tough choices, the selection criteria are crucial. It's the particular words the author chooses to discuss, far more than what he says about them (assuming he's not a complete idiot), that make or break the book. So, as a reviewer, one can't stop the involuntary eyeball-rolling reaction ("I can't believe he wasted a page and a half on X...., but Y doesn't even get a mention). One tends to focus on that maddening (perceived) room for improvement.

Don't get me wrong. Authorial idiosyncrasy in the inclusion criteria is not only inevitable - it's good. We want to see the author's quirky enthusiasms. Except... that we do kind of hope they will overlap to some reasonable extent with our own... cuz otherwise, the ride could get pretty boring.

So, with the understanding that there is no "right" selection, here are a few places where my choices would have differed from Mr Freeman's (I've paraphrased some of the definitions below, for brevity)

Boulangism "a wave of hysterical anti-German sentiment that engulfed France from 1886-1889, provoked by General Georges Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger" .... OK, fine, but this is supposed to be a book about eponyms, not a historical encyclopedia.

Coueism? Coxey's Army? Fourdrinier? Bertillonage? Huh? Was this just random arcana you felt you had to get out of your system, or were you trying to establish your erudition cred? Maybe a little passive-aggressive reader alienation?

Brill Abraham Arden Brill (1874-1948), born in Austria, immigrated to America at an early age, introduced Freudian psychoanalysis to the American medical profession .... yeah, yeah - fun stuff - but did he actually, yanno, introduce his name as a word to the English language. Because, in my dictionaries, "brill" is just a kind of fish, esteemed in England.

And while we're on the topic, why the compulsion to include all these mini-biographical sketches of 19th century scientists? Not to disrespect Ampere, Ohm, Coulomb, Einstein, Faraday, Henry, Malpighi, Mendeleyev, Newton, or Watt, but how big a deal was it back in those days to get a scientific unit named after you? Note that I'm not objecting to Bunsen, Geiger, Edison, Fermi, Gauss, Celsius, Fahrenheit, Bessemer process, Archimedes' principle, Davy lamp, Marconigram, Salk vaccine, Sabin vaccine, Vernier scale, Volta or Maxwell. Though I actually don't think having a law or a piece of lab equipment named for you automatically makes you interesting. Freeman seemed pretty hellbent on getting his 250-word thumbnail biosketch of James Clerk Maxwell in somewhere: personally, I think "Maxwell's demon" would have been a more interesting hook than maxwell, the unit of magnetic flux.

Let's think about this whole unit thing, anyway. Freeman includes the ampere, the coulomb, the ohm, the watt, the farad, the volt, the henry, the newton, degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit, the fermi. (Really it's just an excuse for him to engage in his favorite sport of microhagiography) But why stop there? What about the tesla, the svedberg, the siemens, the sabin, the lambert, the darcy, the sievert, the oerstedt, the pascal, etc. etc. etc? Why not include them all? Well, obviously, to do so would be incredibly tedious and boring. So why did Freeman think amperes and coulombs and henrys and farads were interesting enough to warrant inclusion? What was he thinking?

The sad thing here is that there is actually some fun to be extracted from eponymous units of measurement: one could actually be mildly entertaining, with just a little effort. If I had space to include my dirty dozen favorite eponymous measurement units, I'd steer well clear of electromagnetism. How about instead -

the Apgar score,
the Balthazar,
the Scoville unit,
the Smoot,
the stimp,
the degree MacMichael,
the warhol,
the millihelen,
the centimorgan,
the mickey,
the billigram,
the garn,
the megafonzie

measures, respectively, of neonate status, champagne bottle volume, hotness of chili peppers, distance, the speed of the green on a golf course, viscosity of chocolate, duration of fame, beauty, genetic distance, detectable movement of a computer mouse, the weight an evangelist carries with God, severity of space sickness, and coolness.

I have to finish this and go to bed. So what's my point? Eponyms are truly fertile ground. There is much fun to be had, so it should be possible to write an engaging, interesting, funny book on the topic.

This "New Dictionary of Eponyms" is not that book.

Two stars. Freeman doesn't really care about the words; he's really some kind of frustrated biographer of assorted 19th century public figures.

Here are some eponyms more likely to amuse or entertain you:

bishop, burke, dolly varden, cummingtonite, phryne, shepardize, namby-pamby, oblomovism, tantony pig, syringe, thersitical, St Anthony's fire, yentl's syndrome, Charles's wain, saber's beads, Pele's hair, Mother Carey's chickens.

But you will have to look them up for yourself.