Susie Dent on the real people behind our most popular expressions

'Jack the lad' 'Maverick' and 'on your Tod', our columnist reveals the real-life stories of the people behind some of our most famous words and sayings.

By Susie Dent | Published - 2 Jan 2026

If ever someone wanted to introduce a competition called ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get me in the Dictionary’, it might be hotly contested. The English lexicon is packed full of the names of people past and present who have achieved lasting linguistic fame.

From the French trapeze artist Jules Léotard to the peckish Earl of Sandwich, the boot-wearing Duke of Wellington to the musical Adolphe Sax, eponyms have populated the dictionary for centuries.

But that’s not all, for people reside in its pages in other ways, too: who, for example, was the original Jack the Lad? Was there ever a real flaming Nora or a flipping Ada? And why did Billy No-Mates find himself all alone?

Sometimes, the inspirations for these various personalities are long forgotten. We may never know, for example, the Mickey Bliss who inspired the expression ‘taking the Mickey’, and whose surname provided a useful if rather rude example of rhyming slang (think Mickey Bliss/p***). In other cases, names were simply used generically, as is almost certainly the case with Tom, Dick and Harry.

Pet names have often found their way into language, from the garden robin to the Jack of ‘steeplejack’ and the French Pierre, ‘Peter’, that inspired the word ‘parrot’.

Happily, in other instances, we do know the identity of the person behind a phrase. Jack the Lad, for instance, was Jack Sheppard, born into poverty in 18th-century London. He quickly fell into such crimes as pickpocketing, but his notoriety rests on his spectacular escapes from prison, including in one case picking the locks of six doors that led to the roof.

Sheppard became a folk hero in London and was fondly known as ‘Jack the Lad’. When the authorities did finally catch up with him and Sheppard was taken to his execution by hanging at Tyburn in London, it's said that a third of the population of London came out to witness it.

Tod Sloan, meanwhile, was a star jockey whose enduring legacy to racing is the ‘monkey crouch’ position, in which riders lean low and far forward in the saddle. Sloan achieved such success, he even rode for the King, but fell dramatically from favour when he was accused of insider betting.

His career in tatters and his money gone, Sloan’s final years were far from happy. Historians have cleared him posthumously of any wrongdoing, but we remember him primarily as a sad piece of rhyming slang, in which ‘on your Tod (Sloan)’ means ‘on your own’.

There are hundreds more. The original maverick was Samuel Maverick, a land baron and politician from Texas who refused to brand his cattle. When neighbouring farmers spotted a stray animal on their fields, they would say, "There goes another maverick," inspiring the enduring use of the name for someone who refuses to conform to the rules.

Gordon Bennett! Why so many? Well, I can tell you that the name behind this exclamation was the son of a newspaper magnate and an international playboy. His giddy exploits propelled his name into the news, but it was as a useful and euphemistic sidestep for ‘gor blimey’ that he achieved lasting fame.

Who will be the household names in the dictionary of the future, I wonder? Time will tell, but notoriety in language can be risky – just ask Mickey Bliss. Is it something I would wish for? There is only one answer to that: not on your Nelly.