The glut of names

William Haefeli in the November 9 New Yorker:

Caption: “Will Kristen, Kirsten, and Kiersten please choose new names?”

What, no Kristin?

NYT Week in Review omnibus

The November 15 NYT Week in Review offers a diverse collection of language-related items. The most distantly related is Nicholas Wade’s “The Evolution of the God Gene”, which Mark Liberman has posted about on Language Log, mostly because it comes only a few days after Wade’s latest piece on FOXP2, the “Speech Gene”.

Then there’s an odd piece excerpted from Harper’s: “When Sartre Talked to Crabs (It Was Mescaline)”. Yes, Jean-Paul Sartre. Back in 1929. The mescaline-induced crabs stayed with him for some time; he says he knew they were imaginary, but he still saw them and talked to them. In the excerpt he doesn’t say whether the crabs answered. But we can wonder about the Language of Crabs.

(I’m sorry, I can’t resist it. With apologies to Paint Your Wagon: “I talk to the crabs / But they don’t listen to me”.)

The most obviously language-related item is the editorial cartoon I posted about on this blog earlier today.

But wait, there’s more. There’s an opinion piece by Earl Blumenauer (Democratic representative from Oregon), “My Near Death Panel Experience”, about the disinformation campaign surrounding a provision, in the health-care bill he helped write, for Medicare-supported voluntary counseling on end-of-life planning.

There followed a series of outrageous distortions of the provision — seniors being put “in a position of being put to death by their government” and the like — culminating in Sarah Palin’s framing the matter as Obama’s proposing to create “death panels”. The term death panel pretty much took over public discussion of health care bills, as well as media reporting on it. Blumenauer:

The “death panel” episode shows how the news media, after aiding and abetting falsehood, were unable to perform their traditional role of reporting the facts. By lavishing uncritical attention on the most exaggerated claims and extreme behavior, they unleashed something that the truth could not dispel.

Then, a fluffy piece by David Segal on “Naming the ’00s” (as 2009 nears its end). Attempts to find names for things by asking for proposals are entertaining, but virtually never result in a consensus answer. Instead, a name spreads (if it does) when people actually use it in their writing and conversation and it resonates with others, who use it themselves. It’s not something that you can legislate, or vote on.

Finally, there’s Catherine Rampell’s “How Old Is Old Enough?”, about the social categories of life stages in the U.S., in particular the distinction between childhood and adulthood. In fact, the piece is about how this distinction is made for legal and administrative purposes, where “bright lines” are needed. (The issue that gave rise to Rampell’s article, because it’s been under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court, is the cut-off age for sentencing to life imprisonment without parole.)

But, as Rampell points out,

For drinking, driving, fighting in the military, compulsory schooling, watching an R-rated movie, consenting to sex, getting married, having an abortion or even being responsible for your own finances, the dawn of adulthood in America is all over the place.

Folk categories of life stages don’t usually involve such bright lines; there can be more than two folk categories in this part of the semantic domain; different people have somewhat different schemes of categorization; the folk categories are different in different places and times; and so on. Scientific categorizations are still another matter; as Rampell says, “scientific research has in many ways … blurred, rather than clarified, the distinction between childhood and adulthood.”

So there are three types of categorizations, for different purposes, and more than one scheme of categorization within each type. But discussion of these matters relies — over-relies, I would say — on a binary distinction in English vocabulary, between child(hood) and adult(hood). It’s hard to sort out these matters when only this one distinction is easily available.

Who is this Na person?

This morning I got a Facebook “friend” request from someone named Ds Na. I scratched my head for a moment over the odd name, but then I figured it out: Ds Na was really DSNA (the Dictionary Society of North America), with the name divided in two, and with capitalization as in personal names. And so it was.

I did wonder how to pronounce the name Ds (maybe like does) and whether it’s a woman’s name or a man’s name.

Coerced acronyms

Back in 2007, I posted on Language Log about various types of abbreviation via initial letters of words (in particular, initialisms and acronyms, as in my recent posting on this blog, about hybrids of these) and about which ones are arthrous (with the definite article the) and which anarthrous (without it). As I said back then, one of the crisp generalizations about (an)arthrousness is:

The Acronym Principle: Acronyms are anarthrous (even when the full names they abbreviate are arthrous).

This covers NASA, FEMA, MOMA, Unicef, NOAA and other acronyms whose full forms are arthrous.  It covers at least some hybrid abbreviations, like SFMOMA (part initialism, part acronym), and covers in general “coerced” acronyms, where vowels are inserted to make strings of letters (especially long strings of letters) pronounceable. Like NOGLSTP, pronounced like “nogglestup” and standing for “The National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals” …

My interest in this note is the coerced acronyms. Take NOGLSTP. This is awfully long — seven letters — to be comfortable as an initialism. The NOG part can be read as an acronym, but then you’re in trouble, so you make the L syllabic and break up STP with a vowel between the ST and the P — /ʌ/ in my pronunciation, but I’ve also heard /a/. That gives you a three-syllable word, with heaviest stress on the first syllable and somewhat less stress on the third, with the middle syllable unstressed — the pattern of paramount and a number of other words.

Another example from my life: AGLBFS, the Association for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Faculty and Staff (of the Ohio State University). The AG part can be read as an acronym, and then, again, you’re in trouble, so you make the L syllabic and break up BFS. There’s more than one way to do this: as B-FS (giving something like “buffs”) or as B-F-S (giving something like “buffus”). The first sounds too much like a plural for my taste, so I prefer the second. The stress pattern is again predictable: heaviest stress on the first syllable, then alternating stress.

(Note that the stress patterns don’t have to be learned, but represent one of the default patterns for English.)

Now for a somewhat different case: FNMA (the Federal National Mortgage Association) and FHLMC (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation). The Federal National Mortgage Association came first (in 1938), and its abbreviation could have been treated as a straightforward initialism, but someone decided to treat the MA as an acronym, pronounced like the word may (or May) — or the girl’s name Mae. That left FN, which got expanded to Fannie, giving the Fannie Mae that’s so often in the news. That’s a name, so it gets the stress pattern for two-part names in English: stress on both parts, but heavier stress on the second.

All of this development, except for the stress pattern, was a creative act, not a kind of automatic filling-in of material to make the abbreviation pronounceable.

With Fannie Mae as a pattern, when the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation came along (in 1970), further creativity was called for. FHLMC ends in MC, which can be read as the masculine name Mac, parallel to the feminine Mae. FHL, however, presents a serious problem, and in the end someone just disregarded the HL and looked for a common masculine first name that started with F and was formally parallel to Fannie: Freddie. And so we got Freddie Mac: Fannie and Freddie (as they are known for short), or FNM and FRE (on the NYSE).

Swine!

What to call the influenza virus that’s so much in the news, the one that most people refer to as “(the) swine flu”? There’s been considerable dispute about the name, since no name that’s been suggested so far is entirely satisfactory. The CDC (the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has recently weighed in in favor of a name with “H1N1″ (for the family of viruses responsible for the infection) in it, but even that somewhat unwieldy label (which is unlikely to become an everyday usage) still won’t quite do.

NPR names

Porn actors and drag performers use stage names instead of their real names, and their porn names and drag names are usually chosen for their connotations: porn names in gay porn are hypermasculine, names of drag queens are elaborately feminine. Porn names in gay porn often convey specific personas (preppy, cowboy/country, etc.), and many project toughness or aggression (last names like Stryker and Panther, for example); some details here. Drag queens’ names are very often playful — punning, alliterating, rhyming, alluding to the names of famous people, and so on — and quite often are suggestive (Trixie Dick and Ophelia Dick, for example).

Eventually, people began to devise formulas for generating porn names and drag names, involving your childhood pet’s name (a female pet, for a drag name), your mother’s maiden name, the name of the street you lived on as a child, and similar items, in various combinations. Mother’s maiden name + street name is the formula I’m most familiar with; for me, that produces Rice Highland (not a bad pseudonym), and for a gay couple I know it yields the excellent Chase Palm and Johnson Kincade, but sometimes it leads to laughable names, like Liebowitz 59th and Castro The Alameda de las Pulgas.

Now the blogger Liana Maeby has devised a scheme for generating “NPR names”:

Eric and I recently discovered a shared fascination with the slew of impossibly named NPR hosts we listen to every day: Renee Montagne, Steve Inskeep, Corey Flintoff, Korva Coleman, Kai Ryssdal, Dina Temple-Raston.

In fact, we’ve often wondered what it would be like to be one of them.  A Nina Totenberg or a Renita Jablonski.  A David Kestenbaum or a Lakshmi Singh.  Even (on our most ambitious days) a Cherry Glaser or a Sylvia Poggioli.

So finally, after years of Fresh Air sign-off ambitions, we came up with a system for creating our own NPR Names.  Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name.  Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.

So I’m Liarna Kassel.  And Eric is Jeric Bath.  I even have a new nickname for my little brother in Dylsan Rosarita.

And I’m Marnold [or Arnmold] Und. Though it’s not easy to decide which place is the smallest foreign town I’ve visited.

(Hat tip to Joe Clark.)

International first name, avoiding of

In Mildred Culp’s syndicated “Business Matters” column, as found in the Palo Alto Daily News, 1/1/09, p. 15, she fields a query from “Hopeless”, who reports having “an excellent work history, but I have just not been getting any good hits off my resume”, and asks Culp to review the attached resume. Culp replies:

Before reading your resume, I considered possible discrimination because of your international first name. Consider using a middle name to job hunt [note very common back-formation] or first and middle initials followed by your last name.”

Bowl games

At the restaurant where I had dinner last night (sushi at the bar of the Three Seasons), a football game was flickering past on television: the Valero Alamo Bowl. I was at first puzzled by the name, until I saw that it had a structure: Valero (name of the corporate sponsor, the Valero Energy Corporation) + Alamo (the “proper name” of the bowl, after the Alamo mission in San Antonio, Texas) + Bowl. (I’ve since learned that this game had a previous history as the Builders Square Alamo Bowl, the Sylvania Alamo Bowl, and the MasterCard Alamo Bowl. Bowl names change a lot; the Champs Sports Bowl — Champs Sports is a division of Foot Locker — used to be the Blockbuster Bowl and then the Tangerine Bowl.)

Announcements of other bowl games flashed past. There are a lot more bowl games than there were when I was a boy (there are 34 this season), and most of them are branded (my favorites among the three-parters are the San Diego County Credit Union Pointsettia Bowl and the Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl). Even the BCS [Bowl Championship Series] National Championship Game is the FedEx BCS National Championship Game.

There are in fact three schemes for bowl names, two of them involving branding.