Andrew Breitbart finally has an accomplishment to write home about.

His name is now an eponym used to describe “intentionally taking a statement out of context for political ends.”

As Wordnik.com founder Erin McKean writes in a Boston Globe column titled “Bad Name”:

English added another word to its political lexicon recently: Breitbarting, or intentionally taking a statement out of context for political ends.

The new word surfaced on political websites after conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a video of Shirley Sherrod, a Department of Agriculture official, edited so she appeared to admit being biased against a white farmer. (In the full video, released later, it became clear that Ms. Sherrod was telling a story about overcoming her initial prejudice to help the farmer save his land.)

It was only a few days after the video was released that the verb made an appearance: one early use was by The Nation's Ari Melber, quoted on Politico.com as saying “We live in a world where anyone can be Breitbarted.”

[...]

Why are so many political eponyms overwhelmingly negative? Leaving aside the presidential adjectives (Jeffersonian, Nixonian, Clintonian, Reaganesque) and the political ideologies (Maoism, Peronism, Thatcherism, Gandhism) it seems that if your name is associated with a political word, you're more likely to be infamous than famous. This applies to place names, too: Buncombe (as the source of the word bunkum), Tammany Hall, Teapot Dome, the Beltway, and the Watergate apartment complex are none too pleasant in their associations.

It's interesting that Breitbart was chosen for eponymization rather than Sherrod. Part of it must be due to Breitbart's reputed history of giving less than the full story (he was also the source for some selectively edited videos which implied that voting-rights group ACORN gave advice on tax evasion).

If I were McKean I'd be on the lookout for people dressed up as telephone repairmen wanting to look at her phone.

h/t Glynnis MacNicol