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Onomastic Mastication
Even making allowance for dramatic convention, it's always bothered me a little how few characters in Renaissance and Restoration drama appear to notice the eloquence of their names, especially given their near-universal obsession with wordplay. How could Sir Epicure Mammon, for example, ever hope not to be recognized as a worldly epicure the moment he announced himself? Was Sir Andrew Aguecheek fated from birth to be sickly, along with all the alliterative Agucheeks before him, or could he have shrugged off his fate by the constant application of good diet and callisthenics?
I know, I know, they aren't real people so the question is nonsensical - but given the effort that goes into making these characters appear real in many other ways I still think it a natural and non-trivial one. It's just this kind of irritant that provoked me in a former life to spend three years writing about Spenserian allegory, to the delight of all.
What about our names, though? I always felt sorry for John Craven, and for anyone whose surname happened to be Lipfriend. But some names are subtly ambiguous. For years, I thought of the name "Lance Armstrong" as an uber-macho one, rolling Sir Lancelot and Fortinbras into one. Now, I recognize it as a tacit admission of cheating - that he lanced his arm in order to become strong. Like Poe's purloined letter, Armstrong's confession was lying in plain sight, but few had eyes to see it. Perhaps characters in seventeenth-century comedies are suffering from the same problem? "Falstaff, you say? Is that Falstaff as in 'not really Welsh', or is that a dildo in your codpiece? Or does it, perchance, just happen to be your name?" The possibilities are endless.
I know, I know, they aren't real people so the question is nonsensical - but given the effort that goes into making these characters appear real in many other ways I still think it a natural and non-trivial one. It's just this kind of irritant that provoked me in a former life to spend three years writing about Spenserian allegory, to the delight of all.
What about our names, though? I always felt sorry for John Craven, and for anyone whose surname happened to be Lipfriend. But some names are subtly ambiguous. For years, I thought of the name "Lance Armstrong" as an uber-macho one, rolling Sir Lancelot and Fortinbras into one. Now, I recognize it as a tacit admission of cheating - that he lanced his arm in order to become strong. Like Poe's purloined letter, Armstrong's confession was lying in plain sight, but few had eyes to see it. Perhaps characters in seventeenth-century comedies are suffering from the same problem? "Falstaff, you say? Is that Falstaff as in 'not really Welsh', or is that a dildo in your codpiece? Or does it, perchance, just happen to be your name?" The possibilities are endless.
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In Germany people can be named absolutely anything, for instance, the http://www.ptb.de/index_en.html (where you can learn all you ever wanted to know about the dance of bacteria, for instance) used to have a certain Dr. Dr. (they love double titles, too) Wildschütz (usually translated: "Freeshooter") responsible for the Explosionsschutz (control of arms).
At the time when I worked there (shortly after the Wall had fallen by pure accident) as a telephone operator (we were no call-center) Prof. Dr. Hund (Dog) and his east-german equivalent: Prof. Dr. Sauerbrei (sour dough) were responsible for everything across the former border and talked about it on their bakelite phones.
Frau Pilz (Ms. Mushroom), our colleague on The Other Side used to ring us up once a day and then everyone had to connect to everyone else and never hang up because lines were not stable. Astounding as the names of such an institute of which I still keep a list somewhere, it reminds me I need to post on my PTB-experience what with meeting Einstein´s ghost in the internal wood; white hair standing up astray, hands folded on his back, mumbling formulas to himself.
He wore a white frock and there was a fence surrounding all of us.
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I think that was probably just as well.
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No, I didn´t stay there too long but please forgive me for misusing your site for writing my memoirs
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