Surprisingly, the Australian slang term bogan seems never to have come up here, so I’m pleased to find this 2019 investigation by Bruce Moore, which sums up the known history of the word:
Bogan is the most significant word to be created in Australian English in the past 40 years. It is defined as “an uncultured and unsophisticated person; a boorish and uncouth person” in the 2016 edition of the Australian National Dictionary. […] The type of Australian the term refers to has been the subject of books, television shows, and heated debate. The noun has generated many derivatives and compounds: bogan chick, boganhood, boganic, boganism, boganity, boganland, boganness. Not since “ocker” appeared in the late 1960s as a reference to an uncultured and uncouth Australian male has there been such a productive Australian word.
We have still not established its etymology. Some have argued the term “bogan” may derive from the Bogan River and district in western NSW. But there is no evidence whatsoever that could link our uncouth bogan with this area. […]
Until now, the earliest evidence of the word cited in the dictionary is from a letter signed by “Dave, Phillip Island, Vic” to the surfing magazine Tracks in September 1985. He asks: “So what if I have a mohawk and wear Dr Martens (boots for all you uninformed bogans)?” But fresh evidence discovered by Melbourne historian Helen Doyle, and kindly passed on to me, suggests the word dates to at least 1984, and probably originated in Melbourne. It comes from an article that appeared in the third edition of a magazine produced by students at Xavier College Melbourne in 1984, which includes a detailed description of “the bogan doll”. […]
So by the mid-1980s Melbourne had established the term bogan. It was absolutely synonymous with westie (used to describe someone from the western suburbs of Sydney), the bevan (a Queensland term), the booner (a term from Canberra, sometimes abbreviated to boon — probably a shortening of the American boondocks, meaning “rough or isolated country”) and the chigga (a person from the working-class suburb of Chigwell in Hobart).
At this time a slightly variant meaning of bogan appeared, which also began as a Melbourne term. It was used in teenage slang for someone who was regarded as a bit of a dag, a sense popularised by the fictitious schoolgirl “Kylie Mole” from the television show The Comedy Company (which ran from 1988 to 1990). Kylie Mole was played by the Melbourne-based actor Mary-Anne Fahey, and it seems possible that Fahey picked it up from teenagers like those at work in the Xavier College magazine, giving a specialised “spin” to the general term of abuse. The nerdish bogan was not long lived, however, and it was soon overpowered by the hooligan bogan.
Unlike the other regional terms for “hooligan”, bogan soon spread Australia-wide. The evidence in the dictionary shows that by 1987 it was used at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra (it is included in B. Cowham’s 1987 glossary Legolingo: the Cadets’ Language). Perhaps it was brought there by students from Melbourne. By the beginning of the 1990s it was everywhere. […] The major criteria for boganhood are: a lack of culture and sophistication; boorishness and uncouthness and vulgarity. But being a Melburnian is no longer a requirement.
The OED (entry from 2012) defines it as “An unfashionable, uncouth, or unsophisticated person, esp. regarded as being of low social status,” says “Origin uncertain. Perhaps < the surname Bogan,” and has a first citation from that student magazine:
1984 Flick-knife: standard bogan equipment, used when the bogan is losing a fight.
Xavier Coll. (Melbourne) Magazine vol. 3
(Via chariot pulled by cassowaries’ MeFi post.)
I think of “bogan” as more or less the other-side-of-the-Equator equivalent of BrEng “chav,” which has likewise been found unnecessary to the AmEng lexicon. But perhaps beyond the geographical distinction there are subtle semantic or sociological distinctions between the the referents of the two terms that someone here will be on top of?
My personal favorite unknown-to-Northern-Hemisphere Australian youth subculture denoter is the early-mid-Seventies “sharpie.” According to my researches (largely on youtube), sharpies were kinda/sorta like the early iterations of UK skinheads, but had a different hairstyle which by itself required a different monicker.
Weirdly enough, if you Google for
"bogan" site:languagehat.comyou only get the poet, but"it's bogan" site:languagehat.comfinds a recent usage.That is very weird. I googled [bogan -Louise] and got nothing.
“absolutely synonymous with westie …, the bevan …, the booner … and the chigga”
If each term refers to somebody from the relevant city’s low-class neighbourhood, they are not synonymous but rather analogous or [googles] co-hyponomous
Bogan is quite current in the vocabulary where I live. We speak of certain locales as boganville, which draws for acceptability on the actual geographical name Bougainville, pronounced the same and much mentioned in Australian news over recent decades (less lately). Green’s Dictionary of Slang covers bogan comprehensively and accurately (it includes boganville), though I personally have never heard bog, prominent at the top as an alternative to bogan itself.
On my own initiative I sometimes speak of the “bogan apocalypse”, and am pleased to find it featured chez Green.
I found “Dr Martens (boots for all you uninformed bogans)” hilarious, because it mocks people for not knowing about the hip lingo—while simultaneously using using a name for the product that nobody hip enough to wear the boots organically would ever use, even in 1985. (Okay, maybe things were different in Australia, but I kind of doubt it. In America, where the boots were iconic grunge wear in the period from roughly 1985 to 1995, they are and were always “Doc Martens” or just “Docs” to people who actually wear that kind of gear organically; and my experience with Brits is that those seemed to be normal terms in Britain as well—although maybe referring to “Dr. Martens” would not produce sniggers in London the way it would have in Seattle. And maybe it’s even more different in Victoria circa 1985, but as I said, I doubt it.)
After the wealth of material for bogan I’m surprised to find Bazza given such lean treatment by Green. Have we discussed this before? In Australia many names with /r/ between first and second syllables can have /r/ replaced with /z/, perhaps with further modification. Barry > Bazza, Garry > Gazza, Sharon > Shaz[za], Karen > Kaz, and so on. I’ve even heard Dozza for Dorothy, and I have personally addressed Maureen Wheeler as Mozza. Is this phenomenon known elsewhere?
And Brett, it’s always Doc Martens in Ozland. Never Dr Martens.
In 1982 we said Docs in Cork, but Alexei Sayle chanted “Doctor Martens Boots”
bogus?
Green’s Dictionary of Slang covers bogan comprehensively and accurately (it includes boganville)
Why didn’t I think to check Green’s? He even antedates it to 1983!
As in Australia, so in Austria (where they were still mainstream in the late 90s).
Jeremy > Jezza is attested in the UK.
…and the cognate of the Standard Mandarin r is [z] in some other Sinitic varieties.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/soz
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-z#Suffix_2
The English singer Jez Lowe is Gerard, apparently.
Gazza!
In America, where the boots were iconic grunge wear in the period from roughly 1985 to 1995
There was no such thing as “grunge” before 1991 or so. And I think Doc Martens in the US go back earlier.
Agree that we don’t say “Doctor Martens” in Australia, to the extent that I don’t think I even read “Dr Martens” that way, and I’m not sure it was intended to be read that way in the school magazine.
I remember first coming across “bogan” and coming to understand that it was a “foreign” (Melbourne) term for what I knew as “westie” – relatively synonymous, even if the origin of the terms was based on a particular location. These days “bogan” feels much more common/natural than “westie”.
I and many others (certainly nothing approaching a generational majority in any definable demographic) routinely sported the not-yet-named “grunge” look by 1985. As is often the case, the referent existed (as to wardrobe, if not quite yet as to musical style) before the word and before mainstream-media fascination with the referent. I respectfully disagree with Brett about how tight the grunge/Docs nexus was in those days, however. On the male side, at least, the key point of the not-yet-named “grunge” look was that it was sported by young men who liked punk or punk-adjacent styles of rock music but eschewed particular wardrobe items that were too self-consciously “punk” as emblems of the self-aware London/NYC “punk” style developed in the late Seventies et seq. So Docs were more relevant for fashion-conscious “punks” or “goths” or other such subcultures not engaged in the grunge pretense of not caring about their wardrobe. Ratty old Converse high-tops (or conceivably Vans, for those who moved in skateboard-adjacent circles) would have been more of a proto-grunge footwear choice. Or conceivably “regular American” workboots of the sort you could have bought dirt cheap at an Army-Navy store or comparable emporium. Whatever the no-name bargain alternative to the Red Wing brand was?
By 1992, by comparison, the mainstream media was so fascinated by the just-noticed-by-them grunge trend that they could be easily hoaxed by fictitious claims about the associated dialect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak
“Dr Martens” feels like possibly the work of an overzealous editor, even if it was a letter, although it admittedly would be odd for “the surfing magazine Tracks” to have such a one.
Green River and The Melvins were getting buzz for their new grunge sound in the Pacific Northwest by 1983–1984. By 1986, the grunge name was certainly in use among the neighborhood teens, when I remember it was a big deal when a seventeen- or eighteen-year neighbor scored tickets to a Melvins concert in Portland (as opposed to having to make the much longer trip to the Seattle area to hear the new sound). I’m sure there were a previous cohort of Washington-Oregon punk types, who I undoubtedly did not notice as much since I was younger in their heyday, but they had to have been far outnumbered by the later grunge fans, since by 1990–1991 grunge became so fundamental to the identities of some many young people in the Northwest. The penetration of grunge music, clothing, and culture to other parts of the country was certainly slower—but it seemed like the hip grunge fans from south Salem were all saving up for Docs by around 1987, seemingly well before flannel also became such a key part of the grunge look (at least for guys).
It also occurred to me that, despite being a (now) British company, the name of the shoemaker is “Dr. Martens” with a period after the abbreviation. I don’t like publications changing the punctuation of brand names, but many of them certainly do it.
Brett, the question of periods with abbreviations in titles, trademarks, and the like is vexed. I note your own use of Dr. Who in earlier threads. You have also used the original form Doctor Who, but I have not seen Dr Who from you despite that being the BBC’s very UK preference – if “Dr” is to be used at all. Then again, even the BBC is not entirely consistent. Nor are Wikipedia articles concerning the Doctor Who franchise; nor are films and other productions under that franchise.
As I have suggested before, in ordinary cases of personal naming the “punctuation”* is styling over which a name’s owner should have no control. Where would it end? Can I insist that my name always be presented in Times New Roman? But for periods and such, formal legal names may be another matter.
* Some would argue that punctuation does not include periods in abbreviations, nor apostrophes, hyphens, or word-level en dashes (as opposed to sentence-level). Some have written – I’d have to look it up – as if even quotation marks don’t make the cut.
Gazza was not Gary Lineker but rather his England team-mate Paul Gascoigne
[Mark] Berry → Bez
Yes, Gazza was the first one that I thought of, and then rejected as an example of a different pattern (cf. Paul McCartney -> Macca)
The quoted bit mentions the term dag. This seems to have changed drastically in meaning in recent decades: I have seen multiple Australians react to the 1980s Paul Hogan “SuperDag” comedy sketches with “…but that’s not a dag!”
Gazza was not Gary Lineker but rather his England team-mate Paul Gascoigne
Woops, sorry! I don’t follow Premier League footie much (and not at all in his heyday), so I remembered the moniker but forgot who it applied to.
Baz Luhrmann is not part of the pattern. His nickname comes from TV puppet Basil Brush.
I had no idea Basil Brush was a puppet! From hearing him mentioned, I just figured he was a generic 1970s British children’s television personality, like Peter Purves.
So this /r/ > /z/ is indeed spread around, not confined to Australia where it seems to be most strong.
Attested also: Harry > Hazza; Kerry > Kez; Warwick > Wazza, but alternatively > Wokka (or Wocka, Wakka, etc.). I’ve heard Shaz[za] (mentioned earlier) with particular meaning as a type of female bogan (northern NSW, circa 2002).
Is this phenomenon known elsewhere?
‘Kaz’, ‘Maz’ (but no ‘…zza’) for Katherine, Matthew in South Lancs/Merseyside/Manchester 1980’s. Not ‘Doz’ for their brother Dominic — except if you really wanted to wind him up. Possibly influenced by ‘Neighbours’, but I think it was spontaneous yoof argot.
“Bogan is the most significant word to be created in Australian English in the past 40 years.”
The writer was evidently not being entirely serious with this opening statement… There must surely have been several more significant than this. Selfie being only the most obvious.
The quoted bit mentions the term dag.
The magazine I worked at in the 90s had an intern from Australia, and I learned from her that dag originally meant an ovine dingleberry, aka a Klingon, i.e. dried fecal matter dangling from a sheep’s bum. Clearly a word whose meaning could be extended in many ways.
Yes, Green has that as the etymology (and a variety of slang senses).
A reference for Shazza. Text most relevant to Australian usage (but scroll for other contexts):
And Mazza for Marilyn (Manson in particular).
For dag see also gruff nuts and a host of equivalents. An innate sense of decorum prevents my giving details or links.
From your first link: “The masculine version of this name is Bazza – obviously a nick name for Barry, but more commonly used for describing Shazza’s inbred partner.”
Is this phenomenon known elsewhere?
Well, assuming that by “this phenomenon” you mean “this phenomenon or something similar”, and that by “elsewhere” you don’t only mean in the “English-speaking-where”, I believe there is a similar phenomenon in some rural varieties of Argentinian Spanish, where /rr/ > /ž/, as for example in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnxfPBIbcek, where the singer Mercedes Sosa pronounces “cigarra”, “tierra”, “guerra”, “borraron”, “entierro”, and others, by changing the alveolar trill to a voiced postalveolar fricative, starting at 0:33 (I have to confess that neither phonetics nor phonetic transcription are my forte, so I’m not 100% sure whether /ž/ is the right way to transcribe that sound)
/ʒ/ is the IPA way, /ž/ is Americanist style, and either is a good description, with variable backness.
According to WP, this is a northern Argentine characteristic. Sosa was from Tucumán.
I assumed that [ʒ] for rr in Argentina was a western/northwestern thing, as when I cycled due east to west across Argentina, I first encountered that pronunciation 2–3 days out of Córdoba. A young man walking alongside the road asked if I had seen his lost [ɣoʒa ʒoxa], and I initially had no idea what he was talking about, since I had never been clued into the existence of this accent – foreigners generally only know of [ʒ] as a pronunciation of y/ll in Argentina.
The French word for chair is chaise.
So arroyo would be pronounced [aʒoʒo], with identical consonants?
@Y: Not quite, the y sound is somewhat different from the rr, although for the life of me I can’t describe the difference other than to say that the tongue’s shape is slightly different, a bit rounded for rr perhaps, a bit more tense and palatal for y. As I said above, phonetics is not my forte, all I can say is that [aʒoʒo] doesn’t quite do it. Perhaps someone else can elaborate on this better than I can?
I’d definitely credit “The Comedy Company” for popularising the word “bogan” – at least in WA, maybe not so much in NSW.
E.g. when I moved from Perth to Sydney some 20 years ago, I recall being asked what I was talking about when I mentioned the word.
in ordinary cases of personal naming the “punctuation”* is styling over which a name’s owner should have no control.
[*] Some would argue that punctuation does not include periods in abbreviations, nor apostrophes, hyphens, or word-level en dashes (as opposed to sentence-level).
Really? So if the sacred style guide says so, then you’re fine with Sacha Baron-Cohen or his cousin Simon Baron Cohen, or for that matter Andrew LloydWebber or Lloydwebber? I think not.
JC:
Really?
Really. I stand by what I wrote. For a start, observe my cautionary note about punctuation. We’d have to settle its limits before any rigorous examination of a manual’s demands regarding personal names. If apostrophes and hyphens (spaces too) are considered more a matter of orthography than of punctuation, and a manual’s reach is reasonably not thought to extend to orthography in personal names, then it cannot rule on the name Andrew Lloyd Webber (otherwise known, by the way, as Baron Lloyd-Webber – or The Right Honourable The Lord Lloyd-Webber). If anyone made a manual that tried to rule on such things, and any publisher were stupid enough to require its use, and any editor craven enough to work with such a publisher, then we’d hope that editor would at least resist on this particular point.
Your examples are not of this world. And you excise this without signalling an omission, in quoting me for your comment:
Well, can I get away with that?
There will always be problem situations. People like Di ffrench present a special difficulty. A common solution, which I endorse: Allow her preferred default lower case, but at the start of a sentence (or caption or heading) capitalise as if ffrench were a common noun. As here:
There remains what to do with ffrench in title case, and here – if not earlier – manuals of style can reasonably step in. CMOS 17 is at least clear:
(Nothing at rule 4 or rule 7 supervenes to permit ffrench in headline style.) But the CMOS ruling seems not to be widely applied. The title of the page linked above, for her exhibition, has ffrench uncapitalised: “Di ffrench: Light and Illusion”. And we note, in the photograph of the exhibition’s signage, hyphens instead of en dashes and an ampersand replacing and:
Such is the real world (alas?). Heh, I had to use code for a non-breaking hyphen in that last line, so the sytem here would not make an en dash of the intended hyphen. Such, again, is the real world. Alas.
Some would argue
You don’t make it clear whether you include yourself in that “some” or not. When I write like that, I am not including myself.
And you excise this without signalling an omission
Naturally. I copied your first paragraph and its associated note. I had nothing to say about your second paragraph, so I left it out.
Your examples are not of this world.
The last four words are generally considered positive, yet you seem to mean them negatively.
Di ffrench
I think of initial ff (in English) as a font variant of blackboard-bold 𝔽.
JC:
You don’t make it clear whether you include yourself in that “some” or not.
Correct. It’s not required by the points I make that I do so here. I’m ready to work with any explicit definition that others choose to articulate, for a given discussion. OED, by the way, in its definitions and examples leans toward wanting punctuation to have the more restricted application. But it’s not totally clear:
Naturally. I copied your first paragraph and its associated note. I had nothing to say about your second paragraph, so I left it out.
1. Pragmatically, it would have been helpful to mark an omission (…) all the same. What you did could give the impression that no text came between the two portions of text that you showed.
2. One point of mine was that you would have done well to address the omitted point, which was relevant to the immediate topic. I note that you still don’t address it – and didn’t in another thread, where I put effectively the same question.
The last four words are generally considered positive, yet you seem to mean them negatively.
Well spotted.
I think of initial ff (in English) as a font variant of blackboard-bold 𝔽.
How nice. I doubt that Di ffrench, for example, would have agreed with you.
Now, did I say? I don’t like CMOS. Here (near the top of the page) is University of Chicago Press not following the letter of the CMOS 17 ruling that the first letter of any sentence should be capitalised: “of those critical foci. ffrench-Constant and Koch (chap. 13 in this volume) provide an integrated and compelling model …”.
Compare issues with iPhone, which CMOS wants without initial capitalisation at the start of a sentence (or heading, etc.). Nowhere in CMOS 17 or in CMOS Q&A have I seen an exception for names like ffrench; and we do find this explicit opinion in Q&A (the answer is quoted in full):
I had to use code for a non-breaking hyphen in that last line, so the sytem here would not make an en dash of the intended hyphen
Code for an ordinary hyphen should also work, let’s try:
14 December 2000 ‐ 14 January 2001becomes
14 December 2000 ‐ 14 January 2001
Analyse string can confirm that that’s an ordinary hyphen.
Yes, kt. I thought it would do also. I prefer not to burden myself with knowledge of code for common-or-garden characters (where would it end?) so I used the non-breaking one, leaving some neural circuitry for improving my Latin.
Is capital ß (ẞ, Unicode 1E9E) used much in German title case?
So shouldn’t ff as in ffrench have a Unicode point that is tagged as a capital letter and lower cases to f? Or, better perhaps, are there fonts where it occurs as a swash version of F? (I imagine ff will confuse TTS systems). This doesn’t help if you’re limited to ASCII, of course.
(There’s \ufb00 “Latin Small Ligature Ff” [one would think that would be an occasion to not use titlecase because confusing]. But 1] it’s a representation form, so using it gets you a rap over the knuckles, and many systems will decompose it into two “Latin Small Letter F” codes, 2] it’s coded as lower case, 3] as such, it’s not changed by lowercasing, but uppercasing gives you one [1] F, “Latin Capital Letter F” [?!])
Now riddle me this: When Unicode applies title case to “latin small ligature ff”, shouldn’t it result in “Latin Small Ligature F” given the uppercasing listed in the data base? Or, I guess the codepoint names are in ASCII, so it’s two actual “letter f”s in the name.
And do they really mean that given an input string that encodes, e.g., suffer as suffer, it should uppercase to SUFER? (Interestingly, in the font I’m seeing this in, there is a slight visual difference between two fs together and the explicit ligature). Or are you supposed to decompose before uppercasing?
@Y, as far as I know, ß is never an initial, so the question is only relevant to shouting. (Running upper case, that is).
From “A Slice of Life” by Wodehouse:
“Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?” said Wilfred.
“ffinch-ffarrowmere,” corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capital letters.
“Ah, yes. You spell it with two small f’s.”
“Four small f’s.”
Lars: Capital ß would not be in Initials, but in headlines, signs, etc. Once I unlazed myself, I found a useful discussion on WiP.
Pragmatically, it would have been helpful to mark an omission (…) all the same. What you did could give the impression that no text came between the two portions of text that you showed.
Pragmatically, I expect people to consult your original text, which is right here on the page, if they wish to know what you said. My quotations are simply anchor points.
One point of mine was that you would have done well to address the omitted point
No, I would not have done well, Socrates. My purposes are not yours, and I have my own elenchos.
======
(There’s “Latin Small Ligature Ff” […] it’s not changed by lowercasing, but uppercasing gives you one [1] F, “Latin Capital Letter F” [?!])
That’s because there are two sets of case mappings in Unicode, the simple mappings, which map codepoints to codepoints, and the full mappings, which map codepoint sequences to codepoint sequences of variable lengths. The simple system is present for legacy purposes. It does its best for you, but its best isn’t very good, because it assumes you can map strings by lifting the simple mappings from the domain of codepoints to the domain of vectors.
Both systems are available inCaseFolding.txt. To get the full mappings, you use the lines marked C and F. If you use the lines marked C and S, you get the legacy (“simple”) system. (The T lines are used for Turkish and Azeri mappings, capitalizing and titlecasing ‘ı’ to ‘I’ and ‘i’ to ‘İ’ by overriding the corresponding C lines.)
Now riddle me this: When Unicode applies title case to “latin small ligature ff”, shouldn’t it result in “Latin Small Ligature F” given the uppercasing listed in the data base? Or, I guess the codepoint names are in ASCII, so it’s two actual “letter f”s in the name.
It should give you ‘F’ followed by ‘f’, and it does so using the full case mappings.
And do they really mean that given an input string that encodes, e.g., suffer as suffer, it should uppercase to SUFER? […] Or are you supposed to decompose before uppercasing?
Yes, you decompose first if there is no explicit mapping. Or use these tables, which combine the decomposition and the titlecasing for you.
No, I would not have done well, Socrates. My purposes are not yours, and I have my own elenchos.
So be it, if dialogue is not your thing.
Socrates’ notion of dialogue was to bounce monologue off other people until they resonate to his tune. In Plato’s telling, Socrates was like Trump in that respect. It’s his way or the highway.
I’m not surprised that JC ain’t innarested.
Nor am I. Nor do I care. We invite conversation by issuing questions. Answers are welcome, but not compulsory.
I have wondered whether the most authentic description of an edifying conversation with Socrates is the brief exchange Xenophon describes near the beginning of Anabasis.
i’d vote for the conversation between him and the cup of hemlock, myself. but i was inoculated at a tender age by izzy stone’s book, and haven’t since encountered any reason to think of the man as more than an alfred rosenberg desperately seeking a führer (but with a hellovalot better posthumous press agent). though i am quite fond of delany’s more ambiguous portrait in the Nevèrÿon cycle.
Not only is ß never word-initial*, but German doesn’t have headline capitalization. Even in ALL-CAPS, ẞ is practically never used; its very existence remains next to unknown. When Unicode accepted it, there were 0 ± 3 fonts worldwide that had it, and that number hasn’t increased much. The most common all-caps alternative these days, explicitly preferred by the spelling reform of 1998/2005, is SS, abandoning the famous distinction of in Massen and its near-antonym in Maßen.
* …except in the Langenscheidt dictionary of transcribed Yiddish, which uses s for /z/ and ß for /s/. Also, I’ve seen ßorry (a well-established loanword in some kinds of spoken German) once or twice as a quip in the innertubes.
but with a hellovalot better posthumous press agent
I remember Popper (in “Open Society”) trying to make a distinction between the original Socrates (a curious searcher for truth) and the sock puppet for his own elitist ideas Plato made out of him. I don’t know whether that kind of distinction is still assumed by modern scholarship.
@DM, take a look at the two Unicode proposals (one failed, one suceeded), linked in the WP article (fns. 39, 42).
@Hans: I think, from reading and talking to classicists, that is largely the consensus opinion on the Socratic problem today.
Thanks! That’s good to know.
that’s a very convenient consensus, given that it’s structured to allow people to disavow as “inauthentic” any particular element that’s effectively challenged as indefensibly evil, while continuing to endorse the texts and structures of argument that produce those exact things and the philosophical reputation that upholds them. a license to treat “no true scotsman” selectivity as “nuanced” scholarship.
but even if that weren’t true, the historical socrates (whether corresponding to popper’s just-so-guru or not) is about as relevant to socrates as he affects the world as the historical josh ben pantera is to jesus as he does. “socrates” is, in any meaningful sense of “is”, plato’s socrates, just as “jesus” is the gospels’ jesus. (which isn’t to dismiss the efforts of philologists to untangle socrates as he appears in other sources from plato’s fanfic – or the same attempts with josh – but to be real about the scope of influence of those efforts, as compared to the continued propagation of the entrenched accounts. popper’s still purposefully disingenuous, whether his preferred fanfic is more “accurate” or not.)
Having reviewed these ideas of what Socrates was up to, I return to query Stu’s earlier assertion:
Socrates’ notion of dialogue was to bounce monologue off other people until they resonate to his tune.
How strange. Even mere Googling on Socratic questioning (flanked by quote marks) in the titles of published books confirms the central role of questions in Socratic practice. Questions, as invitations to dialogue and mechanisms of dialogue, are not well characterised as elements in a monologue. I like asking and answering questions. Others may not, but that’s their business. It’s my way, their ways, or various highways. But what a strange blogsite this would be if questionings and answerings did not figure prominently.
@rozele: I don’t really have a qualified opinion on this. IIRC, Popper distinguishes different layers of texts by Plato, earlier ones which show real inquiry by Socrates and later ones where he becomes a sock puppet and the dialogue is built to show the conclusions as inevitable. The only text I have read myself is the “Republic”, where the railroading is transparent and the proto-totalitarianism is rampant, and I cannot really judge how different the other dialogues are. So whether this is just a dynamic comparable to the “Lenin good, Stalin bad” mantra that was customary in the early years of perestroika, or the “Jesus was good, it’s all his followers’ fault” mantra you seem to refer to, or whether there really are good philosophical reasons to distinguish an original Socrates from Plato’s mouthpiece, I leave to the experts.
Questions, as invitations to dialogue and mechanisms of dialogue, are not well characterised as elements in a monologue.
In the case of The Republic we have only Plato’s characterisation. Often the ‘questioning’ is so contrived as to admit of only one answer. Indeed often with tag questions in the Penguin translation i studied.
So ‘dramatic monologue’ is how I think of it, with other voices merely to break up the mono-tony.
Googling on Socratic questioning …
I would beware that those modern interpretations of ‘The Socratic Method’ might or might not be from people who’ve actually read any Socrates (attrib.) The phrase has gained a life of its own.
I’d say the blamming-over-the-head rhetorical devices in The Republic are a lot more Plato than Socrates. Whereas in earlier dialogues, Socrates is depicted as more genuinely an enquiring mind who doesn’t have all the answers and isn’t trying condescendingly to trick interlocutors into a pre-determined outcome.
The later Laws — also in dialogue form — is all Plato, chastened by the failure of his attempts to implement The Republic’s arrogant prickery.
So ‘dramatic monologue’ is how I think of it, with other voices merely to break up the mono-tony.
That’s what I was getting at. Plato’s Socrates was not a midwife, but a domina. Who asks the questions, and demands answers to those and only those questions, controls the exchange.
S: “Is the good better than the just?”
A: “Dunno.”
S: <* whack *> “You know Mommy doesn’t like impertinence!”
Noetica remonstrated with JC for not acceding to N’s dialogic Steuerungsansprüche.
@rozele structured to allow people to disavow as “inauthentic” any particular element that’s effectively challenged as indefensibly …
We allow there were three (at least) Wittgensteins — and we have all the texts in his own words.
We allow there were multiple gospel-writers, writing at somewhat different times and all writing long after the events portrayed, and all with some elements of polemics/eye to legacy.
Then why not allow multiple Socrates’s? (And indeed The Laws isn’t even claimed to be Socrates’ own words.) Our exegetical problem is we have only one polemicist.
I think Philosophers are more interested in what ideas were already in circulation at that time; but with some attempt to put them in coherent ‘clumps’. Then ‘Socrates/Plato of The Republic’ vs ‘Socrates of the DIalogues’ vs ‘Plato of The Laws’ are just handles.
I mentioned Anabasis because Socrates’ advice there is very ordinary:
However, it occurs to me know that even here, Xenophon might have had an agenda. While think it’s unlikely that these conversations with Socrates never took place, Xenophon may have chosen to mention them because he wanted to portray his late mentor as both wise and, more particularly, pious.
i’ve read plenty of plato (in translation) – his socrates is at every turn the prototype of the “just asking questions” troll of today’s internet. like them, he tunes his approach to his audience, flattering or confronting, listening to answers or steamrolling past them, as serves his very transparent goals best in the moment (and never accepting for an instant that anyone ‘reasonable’ might come to different conclusions than his own). and i repeat: that’s the socrates that lives in the world (and who the more intellectually inclined trolls invoke as their legitimizing ancestor).
uncle ludwig is an entirely different story: as AntC says, we have his words as he wanted them publicly circulated (and a fair number of private ones, too!), we have records of his activities, and we also have unmediated accounts from those who knew him. that means he can continue to be present in the world through his concreteness as a person moving through a lifetime, not as a character delineated by a specific canon of other people’s texts (with occasional flutters of awareness that there are other, uncanonized – and equally mediated – texts out there).
if you’re looking for a recent precedent, joe gould would be a better choice. if he is known in two millennia, it will be as joseph mitchell depicted him, not as he lived (and philologists will debate, with little to no effect on the impact of mitchell’s portrait, whether it would be more “accurate” to focus instead on the depictions in saroyan, cummings, burroughs, or tucci).
Noetica remonstrated with JC for not acceding to N’s dialogic Steuerungsansprüche.
Nope. I simply observed, and regretted, that JC did not answer a question that was immediately relevant to the theme ownership of styling (a theme on which he had expressed an opinion in this thread, putting a question to me that I answered in full noetic detail). After I answered his question, my question to JC was this: “Well, can I get away with [insisting that my name always be presented in Times New Roman]?”
I then illustrated some of the issues by examining a problem with names like ffrench, and documented the difficulties encountered in formulating and applying typical capitalisation rules. On this, JC’s “response” was confined to a remark about an entirely unrelated use of ff.
That’s the way here. It’s all fine. But sometimes there’d be more satisfying engagement – and progress toward understanding, even – if discussion were not quite so readily diverted into a cascade of barely connected new lines of thought.
Carry on …
I can’t remember where I picked up the entirely plausible idea that that’s just an attempt to make sense of the good old parthenos, i.e. it’s only historical if the Septuagint is prophetic.
“Well, can I get away with [insisting that my name always be presented in Times New Roman]?”
I took that question to be rhetorical. But if you did not mean it so, I will reply: “Yes, you can.” Of course, it does not follow that anyone will obey.
But sometimes there’d be more satisfying engagement – and progress toward understanding, even – if discussion were not quite so readily diverted into a cascade of barely connected new lines of thought.
I would find it less satisfying.
pantera… parthenos
totally plausible!
i like that patronym because of the band as much as anything (יאָשקע־פּאַנדרע / yoshke-pandre is the more traditional label).
Well JC, as long as you’re satisfied all is in order.
Another interlocutor – less captious, more interested in productive exchange – might have accorded full value to the wording “get away with”. Still, it’s your choice.
Returning to the substantive issue of styling with personal names, “punctuation” and capitalisation are sometimes contentious. Should Di ffrench have got away with demanding lower case “ffrench” at the start of a sentence? Should Louise Smith-Holden–Higgins have that en dash respected, in all publications regardless of their policy with en dashes?
Publishers and editors need rules, and meta-rules to settle where the base-level rules apply and where individual preferences govern instead. You place the boundary one way, and in my own work as a professional editor I place it differently. CMOS hedges its bets, at least in the current edition and associated Q&As. All of that is fascinating for me, but I don’t expect everyone to find such questions unsettled and still open for exploration.
Louise Smith-Holden–Higgins
This doesn’t seem like a useful example, since (as you’ve pointed out, and recently, too) it’s imaginary. My bet is that neither you nor Language Hat have ever used, or even seen, an en dash in a real person’s name in your entire careers.
Capitalization, obviously, is a common real-world problem. Gerard ’t Hooft is definite that the t should not be capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, or in a title or a bibliography — dunno if that extends even to all-caps text, or how often it’s violated (e.g., headline: “’T Hooft and Voltman Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics”). He also objects to not-actually-smart quotes that put an open (left) curly quote before the t. Similarly, I once knew a ben-Aaron who was adamant that the b was “legally” (her word) lowercase and shouldn’t be capitalized in those environments, but Google tells me that the world doesn’t have much respect for that preference, and I don’t know if she still cares.
My bet is that neither you nor Language Hat have ever used, or even seen, an en dash in a real person’s name in your entire careers.
As far as I can recall, I never have. But equally, I have not encountered any insistence on Times New Roman for a personal name. I have encountered insistence on lower case for the first letter, and I was exploring around the issues raised by invoking fictitious but perfectly imaginable parallels. And as you will recall, at Australia’s Beyond Blue they at first insisted on lower-case italicised beyondblue as the exact styling by anyone wanting to use the name, in all stylistic contexts. The cases I put forward are not so remote, and are useful in our examination of boundaries. They may help us to achieve clarity in discussions of periods and commas with Jr, Mr, and the like, in our styling of personal names.
(Relatedly, how are Hatters to style ktschwarz or rozele at beginnings of sentences? ☺?)
The good people at CMOS, hedging as usual, come do close to giving their blessing to an en dash in certain complex personal names.
He also objects to not-actually-smart quotes that put an open (left) curly quote before the t.
Confirming my point about the utility of conjectural cases. It’s an open question whether he can get away with insisting on the “correct” right-curly-quote apostrophe – or for that matter, the undirected straight-up-and-down. (Undirected apostrophes, and double and single quote marks, are called for at Wikipedia’s Manual of Style.)
Damn, caught by the time limit: “do come close”.
@noetica
Maybe if you could signal rhetorical questions better (or leave them out, especially in long posts), it would be easier to provide responses. For example, I do not think you are seriously suggesting that rozele wishes us to write her “handle” in a particular way, or feels disappointed or offended if we do not. I agree that deliberate mangling of names or “handles” can be (intentionally) offensive, and offenders should be called out, but I am not convinced that this principle can be usefully codified in style rules, other than stating it as a principle.
The not-actually-smart quotes aren’t really a question of personal preference but of software introducing errors, much like autocorrect misspelling a word or name. While the typewriter-style straight apostrophe is used for both opening and closing single quotes in some contexts, if different characters are used the apostrophe should look like the closing single quote, not the opening. I don’t think anyone is consciously deciding that an opening quote should be substituted. They’re just not noticing or not bothering to fix the error introduced by flawed software.
since i’ve been invoked: Noetica’s right that i, personally, don’t care much about whether i’m capitalized or not, especially in a space like this. but in other parts of life i have a surname, and it contains a slash (a la melanie kaye/kantrowitz zts”l), and i am both annoyed and offended at the ways that most computerized forms use reduced character sets for names and make it impossible for me to enter it correctly, creating easily avoidable confusion because of the enforced incorrectness.
and, without kantian implications, i’d be tickled pink if i encountered someone whose name was font-specific! i don’t see that as being different in principle from insisting that one’s ø, ñ, or ç be used – and similarly understandable-but-a-trifle-rude when people use the best approximation available.
…
…How did that happen?
i was tempted to just say: you really can just do all kinds of things!
but: melanie wanted to use her patriline’s historical surname*, but without erasing the history of the change after immigration to the u.s. – thus kaye/kantrowitz. i’d been considering a similar reversion, and after reading her account of her answer, followed suit. it’s since turned out that the spelling i adopted is almost certainly not the one my great-grandfather set aside, which makes it an even denser layering of histories.
.
* with the usual caveats about yiddish jews not having them until they were imposed fairly recently
Ah. I’d have just gone for a hyphen.
in my contexts (and melanie’s, though they were less common when she changed her name), hyphens are very specifically for joining patriline and matriline surnames*. part of the reason for the slash was to have a different mark to show not a combining of names but a single name changing through time.
.
* perhaps clunkier than the iberian approach, but to my eye better than the GlaxcoSmithKline version (which was inflicted on some of my sister’s classmates). i’ve also encountered spliced approaches (we used to joke that a Zimmerman-Bergman i used to know would have been better off that way, either as Zimmerberg or Manman), and i know several families that have taken entirely new surnames, either on formal partnership or on having a first child.
There is of course a difficulty in establishing a widely-understood convention for doing something that hasn’t been commonly done, which does not detract from rozele’s point that, in fact, you can just do all sorts of things and see what happens. One issue with using a “/” to join different historical versions of the “same” surname is which temporal order of the versions is implied. The late Ms. Kaye*/Kantrowitz was going backwards in time, which makes perfect psychological sense given her starting point. OTOH, I might refer for historical purposes to my Brouwer/Brewer line of ancestors, instead going forwards in time as one often does in historical narrative.
*This has nothing directly to do with the perfect legitimacy of Ms. K/K’s own feelings of regret/loss as to the historical surname change, but I’d be interested in seeing stats as to what percentage of Americans surnamed “Kaye” as of let’s say 1940 were *not* Ashkenazic, because I’m guessing it’s pretty low. “Kaye” was an assimilationist or “American-sounding” surname the way Sidney and Morris were, by 1940, as given names for sons. No one was, as a general matter, fooling anyone. If anything, a generic Gentile-American with little knowledge of East European onomastics might be less likely to pick up on the notion that “Kantrowitz” was a marked-as-Ashkenazic name rather than an “I dunno, could be a Polish Catholic family for all I know” name.
Rozele [sic]:
Very interesting contributions! Just goes to show: all manner of characters and curlicues do in fact turn up, for name registries, style manuals, publishers, and editors to wrangle and perhaps regulate.
Birth’s, Deaths, and Marriages (BDM) is the registry in the state of Victoria, Australia. Most relevant for the present discussion are certain restrictions on creativity:
* Period at the end of the last item (only) in a displayed “fragment list” (not a list comprising full sentences), as required by the utterly wretched Australian Government Style Manual; the reason, which is placed in a way that gives it uncertain scope in the provisions: “If you don’t include the full stop, people using screen readers may assume the next paragraph is part of the list.”_______
So in Victoria, if the form is not already establishable “by repute or usage” the only acceptable characters are:
One issue with the slash character “/”: like hyphen, it may have significance in coding and other IT contexts: folder names, URLs, etc. Most systems presumably cope well if a hyphenated name turns up, but a slash might stump some.
When I had to devise file-naming protocols for a group of collaborating editors, before the period and filetype suffix I allowed only A–Z and a–z (not á, ñ, etc.); 0–9; and ( and ) in a highly restricted way. No spaces, nor substitutes like _. A fictitious example, an intermediate draft of Part C1 of a Discovery Project grant application for 2022, with Núñez as the main applicant, already processed by editor DF and still undergoing processing by editor EJ:
The system was quick to learn, and saved us from headaches and disasters. I use it still.
I am skeptical as to whether the Victorian authorities are going to register diacriticals. The way to test it would be for an authentic local Bogan to insist on the supposed ancestral spelling of Ó Bogáin or ÓBoughain and see if the extra Gaelic curlicues survive the bureaucratic data-entry process or get Anglicized to e.g. O’Bogain – or maybe more likely O’BOGAIN.
My full first name contains a hyphen, and on several occasions that has caused problems in English-language online forms, which treated it as a disallowed character.
I have wondered about when and whether it is meaningful to distinguish a hyphenated first name from a first name and middle name. As I have mentioned, my great-great-uncle, when assigned by his elder brother to go down to the office and register my grandmother’s birth, put down her given names as: first name, “Betsye-Rose”; middle name, none. My grandmother persisted in using the peculiar spelling “Betsye,” but she and her parents just treated “Rose” as a middle name. Largely as a result, I by default tend not to distinguish a space from a hyphen as a separator of given names.
I guess it’s time to reference Little Bobby Tables.
I have wondered about when and whether it is meaningful to distinguish a hyphenated first name from a first name and middle name.
In German, that’s easy – someone with a hyphenated name is called by that name, e.g., Hans-Jochen*), while if they have several first names separated by spaces, only one is the name they’re actually called by (the Rufname). Not necessarily the first one; my maternal grandfather’s first names were Friedrich Eduard Kurt, and his Rufname was Kurt. I have seen birth certificates where the Rufname was marked by underlining.
*) At least in relatively formal situations, like teachers addressing students at school or when co-workers are officially on a first-name basis at work. Friends and family may settle on simplified solutions, like in my case (most people call me Hans in real life), or contractions like Hajo for Hans-Jochen or Hans-Joachim.
@Hans-Jochen: It occurred to me that someone I mentioned in a previous discussion of hyphenated given names changed the name he went by professionally from Uwe-Jens to just Uwe around the time he moved back from America to Germany for family reasons.
In AmEng it is likewise the case that someone whose given name is explicitly hyphenated like e.g. “Anne-Marie” is going to be addressed as such, not as bare “Anne.” OTOH, people whose names are spelled as “Annemarie” or “Anne Marie” may likewise be addressed as such, so while the hyphen is meaningful it’s absence is not necessarily meaningful.
OTOH, French caught the hyphenation bug for given names at some point, but e.g. as I understand it the painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was conventionally addressed only as “Camille,” that being his, um, Rufname.
Web forms tell me my name is invalid about once a month… for booking flights I don’t even dare try.
Well, that’s no wonder with your fancy ć 😉, but I find it astonishing that they exclude something common like the hyphen.
Rozele:
Ah yes:
Do you think, Rozele, that Kant was here influenced by a certain lens grinder in prudent self-exile at Rijnsburg? I conjecture that necessitation David Lewis draws from the same spring, through a turbid line of translation, notably in his Parts of
GlassesClasses (1991).Now, your default appears to be “avoid capitals altogether”, even if your comments include some out of respect or a local need for clarity, or for less perspicuous reasons:
For me that’s like using blanket italics. When people do that they often turn off the default italics to mark what italics would normally mark, as in this fictitious bibliography entry: “From Stephen Hero to Finnegans Wake: Joyce and the return of cyclicity”. Quoting from an abstract presented in italics, I would not preserve the italics – any more than I would strive to preserve its chosen Garamond. Similarly, in excepting “rozele” from your text I would apply my own more standard styling. I’m relieved that you don’t mind!
But with ktschwarz it’s different. Here we have a standard styling except in the commenter’s handle.
Some styling options in mentioning this commenter:
I’m guessing that kt doesn’t care much, but I’d like to see an opinion (and perhaps something about pronoun choices). Most people would go for option 1 above, and again it hardly seems to matter. But it could get a little more interesting when University of Chicago Press finally brings out its long-awaited Annotated Languagehat Omnibus.
Barry > Bazza, Garry > Gazza, Sharon > Shaz[za], Karen > Kaz
My mother has a relative (cousin?) called “Chaz”. He’s also known as “Charlie”. (Actually, I think that’s the name he normally goes by, but to those who knew him from way back, apparently he’s still “Chaz”.)
When people do that they often turn off the default italics to mark what italics would normally mark
As do I, unless there are too many of them and I say the hell with it.
4. As in 3 but with further styling conventions applied (KT Schwarz, K.T. Schwarz, or K. T. Schwarz).
The third of these is the style I’d adopt unless told otherwise. My coauthor on one document uses the mononym “Idiomdrottning”, which she downcases, but I titlecase (having checked with her that that’s not a problem).
omething about pronoun choices
I now use they/them/their unless I have reason (as I often do, of course) to use some other pronoun. By reason I do not necessarily mean consent.
but to those who knew him from way back, apparently he’s still “Chaz”
I’m pretty sure that Chaz is unrelated to (or at most accidentally duplicated by) the Australian convention, and that it is a spoken version of the written abbreviation Chas. with period, like Jas. for James, Jac. for Jacob, etc. These forms go back to the 16C or earlier. My father (born 1904) sometimes wrote his first name Thomas as Thos., although he used many other forms: T. A. Cowan, Thomas Anthony Cowan, Thomas A. Cowan (probably the most common in writing), Tom Cowan, etc.
Bertie Wooster has a cousin named Thomas who is called Thos (presumably /θɒs/ or /θɒz/). I don’t know that Jas. or Jac. are ever pronounced (though Jac. would be indistinguishable from Jack or perhaps Jake). Jno. and Wm. seem even less likely to be said as written.
I think Thos. is pronounced Thomas. Wodehouse loved that sort of thing. He even had Jno. used in dialogue, where it must have been pronounced exactly as “John” (unless you are the sort of person who can hear the difference between F and ff).
There’s no period in “Thos” there. It’s in things like “I wonder what young Thos will be up to this afternoon, with the eye of authority no longer on him?” And pronouncing it as written seems like exactly the sort of thing Bertie would do. I’ve definitely heard it read that way in an audiobook.
Are there recordings of Wodehouse himself reading?
FWIW, Johannes as a Danish first name was often abbreviated Johs. and that was sometimes adopted as a nickname; my mother had a colleague who was called /jos/. (The name is still used, but I haven’t seen the abbreviation in current use).
The Nobel price winner Johannes Vilhelm Jensen will be referred to as Johs. V. Jensen even on book covers, but usually spoken as Johannes V. Jensen. I think using the shorter form in speech would have been a solecism in educated circles. (I’m not sure those still exist in Denmark, education not being a social cachet any more, and in any case I don’t hang out with people who make dinner conversation about Johs. V. Jensen).
As a teenager, my conception of the hunter-gatherer life style was large founded on his The Long Journey. I would be afraid to read it again with what I know now, I think he was a bit of a chauvinist.
In German, Johann & Josef/-ph were routinely abbreviated Joh. & Jos. back when the names were (very) common. They’re both practically extinct, and you can only see the abbreviations on store walls that haven’t been repainted in at least a hundred years. I’m not aware of any evidence the abbreviations were ever read aloud as words; the period was never dropped.
languagehat : Are there recordings of Wodehouse himself reading?
You mean aside from the whole WWII thing? I don’t know if there are recordings, but there must be.
I’ve always assumed that Jno.is an abbreviation for Jonathan and never for John, which is pretty short already. When I am in the right sort of geeky circle I explain that although John looks like a short form, it has a different underlying Hebrew etymology, which for whatever reason is tarred with Christianity. I remember reading a story (sorry, no bibliographic deets) that features a wealthy semi-crypto-Jew whose food is prepared by a John and a Mary. When somebody questions this, he snorts “Perfectly good Jewish names.” (That he paid them to change their names is not spelled out.) He also startles his more conventionally Orthodox guests by feeding them bread baked in a communal oven rather than a kosher one, and he says (I haven’t checked this) that the Talmud actually discusses this case as a subcase of Jews living “in the wilderness” (i.e. unsupported by a Jewish community): normal stringencies are supposed to be relaxed, as their life is hard enough.
(I’m trying to get the Recently Commented pages rebuilt, but I’m having trouble doing so, because long-running ssh sessions get dropped when they appear to be idle. I need to modify the process to introduce more chatter. I’ve also had some sort of low-level illness that has kept me from commenting. Today is, fortunately, a good day.)
“I’ve always assumed that Jno.is an abbreviation for Jonathan and never for John” — no, it’s definitely an abbreviation for John, though why anyone wanted a 3-letter abbreviation for a 4-letter name is beyond me. I first encountered it in the Oz books illustrated by John R. Neill, who frequently signed his work as “Jno. R. Neill”.
Thanks for rebuilding the Recently Commented page. Looking forward to it.
He also startles his more conventionally Orthodox guests by feeding them bread baked in a communal oven rather than a kosher one,
He might have startled them even more but with equal biblical licence if he’d fed them locusts (exempt from the general prohibition concerning insects, n’est-ce pas?).
As for Jno, Ozlanders might take it as abbreviating Johnno – a typical bogan name alteration.
If it’s not bogan, what kind of dyslexia went into creating Jno.? (It doesn’t work for Jonathan either.) I mean, FAK for Fußballklub Austria makes sense if you take a look at the logo, but…
no, it’s definitely an abbreviation for John
And so says Wikipedia. News to me; like JC, I had assumed it stood for Jonathan. What a weird abbreviation! I wonder what the history is?
“Kerrywood” says (on what authority I don’t know):
The Writer, Volume 5 (Jan. 1891), p. 125:
That makes sense; compare Ihesus.
Googling reveals a 19th-century reprint of some Yorkshire parish registers from the 1560’s that identifies one decedent as “Jhohannes filius Johani,” which seems a bit inconsistent.
You want consistency, look to the ant, not to humans.
Maybe it’s funny in that it shows Latin as (in specific spheres) a living language employed by ordinary people, with orthography as random and inconsistent as the Englysshe of the day, whereas in more recent centuries Latin class tended to attract those psychologically predisposed to a sense of order and structure and rules for everything that would eliminate discretion and improvisation.
Maybe it’s funny in that it shows Latin as (in specific spheres) a living language employed by ordinary people, with orthography as random and inconsistent as the Englysshe of the day
Indeed. I recommend an immersion in Eileen A. Gooder’s Latin for Local History: An Introduction (or any similar work) to disabuse oneself of any sense of order and structure and rules for everything.
Was Chas. Addams ever called “Chazz”? Some other Charleses are.
Jack Aubrey signs personal letters as “Jno. Aubrey”; his official name appears only rarely, mainly in bureaucratic notices such as “Captain John Aubrey, Royal Navy, is restored to the List with his former rank and seniority”.
John Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence as “Jno. Witherspoon”; the rest of the Johns who signed (Hancock, Penn, Morton, Hart, and Adams) all spelled out “John”, though many of the other signatures use abbreviations, such as “Th Jefferson”.
Chazz Palminteri’s real first names are (it says here) Calogero Lorenzo.
Calogero!