In the 1840s, Samuel Augustus Maverick was a Texas cattleman who refused to brand his cattle because he said it was cruel to the animals. Rather than hail him as a humane hero, his neighbors denounced him as a damned hypocrite because his kindness enabled him to lay claim to all the unbranded cattle that wandered onto his range. Lawsuits and shoot-Õem-ups are said to have followed, but the result was a triumph of eponymy: the cattlemanÕs name, Maverick, became the word for an animal that bore nobodyÕs brand.

MaverickÕs grandson and great-grandson became Texas politicians. In 1944, the former Representative Maury Maverick coined a word for bureaucratic obfuscation: gobbledegook. He said the language in official Washington sounded to him like the gobbling of a strutting turkey cock, Òand at the end of the gobble there was a sort of gook.Ó