I ONCE read an interview with inventor James Dyson that later caused me some embarrassment.

Dyson revealed it was his ambition to see his name replace Hoover in the dictionary as the verb to vacuum-clean. Instead of doing the Hoovering, he wanted the verb of choice of the ordinary man and woman to be Dysoning.

I’ve always had a lot of admiration for Dyson and his doggedness in not abandoning his dream to become an inventor.

Through years of frustration and overdrafts and loans he never once listened to the critics who said he was mad and would never succeed. You see, he had this unshakeable vision of inventing a super-powerful vacuum cleaner that used cyclone technology instead of those horrible liable-to-burst-spilling-muck-all-over-your-carpet vacuum cleaner bags.

After reading this and of Dyson’s desire to oust Hoover from the language, I felt the man deserved a chance.

Perhaps I was the only person in the world outside of the Dyson family who elected to do this, but I made a decision to refer to vacuuming as Dysoning or as it should eventually become, dysoning, with a lower-case ‘d’.

I told my wife and she liked the idea. My children, too, have always referred to the household task of running the vacuum over the carpet as Dysoning.

It became the natural thing to call it. We forgot all about it.

All well and good.

That was until we were in conversation with another family and the talk turned to household chores and I said something like: “... yeah, and I’d just done the Dysoning and I was about to…”

Sorry, said our friends, what?

I didn’t know what they were talking about.

“What’s Dysoning?” they asked.

So natural had it become to use the D-word that it had actually nudged Hoovering out of our vocabulary.

I was more than a little embarrassed. But we are defiantly Dysoners to this day still.

It is fascinating to think of the people of history whose names have come to define the activity or field of endeavour with which they became known. Their names become shorthand which we all recognise instantly, even when you might not recall who the original person was.

Somebody takes a photograph and somebody else says: “Come on, David Bailey, hurry up.”

Or if you ever get a bit flowery with your language, some wag will bring you down a peg or two with “Listen to Shakespeare, here”.

Display your ignorance on a subject, and you’re liable to be ironically called ‘Einstein’.

It happens with fictional characters, too. State the bleeding obvious and you, quite rightly, will be greeted with “No sh*t, Sherlock”.

Right, that’s me done, I’m going to do a Lord Lucan.