Back in 2019 I expressed “a combination of irritation and admiration when it comes to John H. McWhorter”; now the admiration has evaporated and the irritation has condensed into something more like rage. As it happens, I wondered about the origin of the given name of Ketanji Brown Jackson; that Wikipedia article doesn’t explain it, but I found a site that quoted her as follows: “When I was born here in Washington, my parents were public school teachers, and to express both pride in their heritage and hope for the future, they gave me an African name; ‘Ketanji Onyika,’ which they were told means ‘lovely one,’ she said.” Fine, but what kind of “African name”? I was stymied until I ran across the 2022 podcast “Where Is the Name Ketanji From?” by John McWhorter. Hey, he has his faults but he knows something about African languages, thought I, and hit Play. I didn’t understand why it would take over 38 minutes to answer the question, but hey, he’s a wordy dude; as long as he tells me, I won’t regret the investment of time! Once he started talking about how people don’t grasp how varied African languages are and began describing some, I sped it up to 150% and skipped chunks where he went on long divagations or played random songs he happened to like. He mentioned that people who speak Twi, Yoruba, and Igbo are said to be particularly good at learning Chinese (and provided a long comparison of Yoruba and Chinese); he said there was an Ijaw-based creole in South America; he explained why Swahili was chosen as the language to learn if you wanted to learn an African language. I got more and more aggravated. Finally, in the last 30 seconds, he said he had called a friend who knew about West African languages and who said that Ketanji “sounds like it might be Atlantic”: maybe Fula? maybe Wolof? That feels right to McW!
So after wasting a ridiculous amount of time I was left as ignorant as before, and I am making this post to let off steam and because hope springs eternal: perhaps some learned Hatter will be able to do better than the loquacious JMcW. Does something like Ketanji Onyika actually mean ‘lovely one’ in some actual language?
sounds like it might be Atlantic
John Merrill, who actually does know about Atlantic languages, remarks in his thesis:
So “sounds like it might be Atlantic” is about as linguistically well-informed as “sounds like it might be Asian.”
McWhorter really should leave the subject of West African languages alone. He knows much less about it than he thinks he does.
People actually called Onyika seem mostly to come from Nigeria:
https://forebears.io/surnames/onyika
It looks vaguely Igbo to me, but I am no better informed about Igbo than McWhorter is about Wolof or Fulfulde. (All I am truly competent to say is that “Ketanji Onyika” is not Oti-Volta …)
The absence of any named African language tells its own story, I think.
Some online sources claim that her parents got the name from a list of suggestions from an unnamed aunt who either was at the time or previously had been a Peace Corps volunteer in “West Africa,” w/o further specification. So it must be from whatever single/undifferentiated language they speak there. Is that language called “West African” or would that be too simple? I have a college classmate (trying to arrange lunch later this month to catch up) who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, so maybe that’s excluded from the “West Africa” the Corps sends other volunteers to. (I know he already knew French before he went and picked up some Wolof while there but I’m not sure if he got any local languages beyond that.)
Someone ask the aunt, or if she’s deceased at least find out where she was in West Africa. Perhaps the original list survives in the Brown family archives.
Two weeks after the podcast, McWhorter recycled it in the NYT with a more useful title.
Going at it the other way, the list of possibilities in “African Best Baby Names” by Emmanuel Anene gives “Osotse” as a name meaning “beautiful one or pretty one” and the only one with that exact supposed meaning.* The author “hails from Owerre Olubor in Delta State of Nigeria,” but I don’t know how heavily skewed the names in his book are to that region. FWIW many other recent baby-name books are set up in the google book corpus in “no preview” mode, so it’s hard to browse intelligently.
*There are others with meanings given as e.g. beautiful girl, beautiful child, good and beautiful woman, lovely woman, etc.
Two weeks after the podcast, McWhorter recycled it in the NYT with a more useful title.
If only I’d found that rather than the podcast! No more information, but less time wasted…
In quite a lot of actual African cultures (as opposed to African cultures as romantically imagined by Americans), calling your child “Lovely One” would be just asking for some calamity to befall her.
(The Kusaasi don’t get hung about about it, though: though most girls get perfectly sensible names like “Small Tree Woman” or “Tuesday” or “Rubbish Tip”, I have come across a “Has Intelligence.”)
One wonders how much creative licence the elder Browns took…
… I heard the name Croía for the first time today and discovered that Conor McGregor named his daughter thus in 2019 and by 2023 it was 23rd most popular girl’s name in Ireland. It’s Irish croí “heart” with an added -a for… I guess euphony? Monosyllabic girls name are unfashionable, whereas Croía follows in the phonetic footsteps of Leah, Mia, and Fiadh.
Many Irish people want to name their children with Irish language words, not necessarily traditional Irish language names. I guess similar holds for some African Americans
In looking for clues, I wonder if Onyika is English orthography for what would normatively be spelled anyika.
Ed.: Dr. Internet says that the Gullah name Anyika supposedly means ‘she is beautiful’ in Vai.
Though some of McWhorter’s essays are persuasive, I found his Aug. 29 one, “‘Joy’ Is a Euphemism No One Wants to Say Out Loud” puzzling. I wondered how he’d make Hubert Humphrey, “the happy warrior” fit in. Or, though he does mention him, Walz.
One should note in fairness to Justice Jackson’s parents that they named their daughter in 1970, which was very early in the vogue for “African” given names in the U.S. It wasn’t like there were a lot of minimally-well-researched references you could look to for ideas, especially if you knew enough (which her parents may have) to know that Arabic-sounding names were not particularly “indigenous” and that the Swahili-origin names which were enjoying a vogue in the late Sixties were almost certainly from the wrong side of the continent in terms of their own family tree, which due to the cruelty of historical circumstance they are unlikely to know in the sort of detail that would trace involuntary-immigrant ancestors back to any identifiable specific ethnolinguistic group(s) of origin or even a specific country/ies of origin if you retroject the somewhat arbitrary post-independence borders back onto earlier centuries.
A separate and unrelated but perhaps interesting onomastic fact. Justice Jackson’s surname is “stereotypically” a black one in the U.S., and the stereotype has an empirical basis:* it is one of a handful of surnames that are both fairly common in absolute terms and for which >50% of their American bearers are black (per some census data from I think 1990). But it’s her married name, and her husband from whom she acquired it happens not to be black. Her maiden name, Brown, is said to have about 34.5% of its U.S. bearers be black, which is more than average (for the most common U.S. surnames) but in the same approximate range as e.g. Jenkins or Simmons, which is to say not quite enough to give rise to popular stereotypes and make it racially-marked. (If you look at the surnames of the prior black justices in the same listing, Marshall comes in at 26.4% and Thomas at 38.2%.)
*The usual conjectured basis is that for former slaves who did not wish to carry the surname of their former owners, a “safe” and thus common alternative was to adopt the surname of a U.S. President who was very well-regarded by powerful whites in the Jim Crow South, which gets you Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson. Adams or Lincoln or Grant, not so much. But that’s not the mechanism by which the ancestors of the justice’s husband got the Jackson name.
One should note in fairness to Justice Jackson’s parents that they named their daughter in 1970, which was very early in the vogue for “African” given names in the U.S.
Sure, and just to be clear, I have absolutely nothing against “African” names that aren’t actually African; if the Browns got a pleasant-sounding name from a list, good for them. I simply want to know if it actually does mean something in a particular language (or a couple of languages, since there are two names). If not, that’s groovy!
I mean I gotta say: I have transitioned from esteem and pride* to irritation in my feelings toward Our John.
*McWhorter grew up in the same neighborhood as me (he’s a few years older), and the origin story around his interest in linguistics is eerily similar to mine.
I must be a few years older than Garrigus Carraig because McWhorter and I are the same age (okay I’m a couple months older if wikipedia has his birthday right) and I grew up maybe 25 miles or thereabouts to the southwest. My “eerie parallel” as I may have mentioned before is that when we were both in 8th grade,* 45 years ago this past spring, I wrote a sort of extra-credit research report on the varied languages spoken in Surinam, as we then spelled it in the U.S. It was a typically superficial sort of public-school thing, but I daresay a fairly exotic subject or so my teacher thought. And then, gosh darn it, McWhorter grew up and figured out how to actually turn pro and get people to give him actual cash money to go do more substantive research about language use in Suriname (as it had become in the interim), while I by contrast had found it expedient to give up my dilettantish interest in linguistic matters long enough to go to law school and figure out how to scrape out a bourgeois living doing something else.
*I to this day have never met him but do know through various connections people of the same cohort who knew him growing up in Philly.
2022 LH on African American surnames
It’s Irish croí “heart” with an added -a for… I guess euphony?
Looking to the future. “A girl’s name ending in ‘a’—that always suggests a ‘C’ cup.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Dr. Internet says that the Gullah name Anyika supposedly means ‘she is beautiful’ in Vai
And Vai not?
(I doubt whether Vai distinguishes “he” and “she”, but all the better!)
I can find no online sources for Vai vocabulary, but in its closest relative, Kono, “beautiful” is ɲimà, which (as you can see) is exactly the same!
Actually, the root of that appears to be ɲi, and the -ma bit seems to be an adjective-deriving suffix (like -maa in Mandinka etc.) For all I know, -ka could derive stative verbs, or abstract nouns or something.
Ok I’ll go ahead. McWhorter and I both had a Hebrew-speaking classmate and friend in our early years (in my case, I was four). Also his mother and my father both taught social work at Temple.
onyika as anyika makes sense to me, especially thinking about it as a gullah name, which could easily have been circulating in 1970 with no consensus on the spelling.
A cɛ ka ɲi means “she* is beautiful” in Bambara/Dyula. I mean, that’s practically the same as “Ketanji” …
* Or “he.” Or “it”, come to that. It’s literally “her/his/its appearance is beautiful.” Judging by the two words I actually recognised in Kono (“woman” and “beautiful”), the Kono/Vai subgroup doesn’t seem all that remote from Mandinka/Bambara/Dyula. Just guessing, though.
Nice! I hope it is, at whatever remove, from Bambara; I always liked Bambara and at one point wanted to learn it.
As I have no doubt but that everyone wants to know, “She is beautiful” in Kusaal is O vɛnl. It seems to lack potential as a given name for Anglophones, but YMMV. “Ovelle” … nah.
The Mooré A yaa neere might pass muster. “Ayanera.” Maybe …
Ovenelle — what a lovely name!
Seems a bit too Tradwife for the Modern Age, though.
The Dagbani form corresponding etymologically, O viɛla, though it does lend itself to being turned into the perfectly plausible “Oviela”, actually means “She is good”, which is no kind of a name to inflict on a child.
Ovenelle — what a lovely name!
Didn’t General Electric trademark that in 1951?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/334504205876
Oviela and Ovenelle make me think of sheep.
Apparently, in Kimbundu (Angola) kitanji means “abastado; opulento; rico”, which seems like a plausible meaning for a personal name. But I offer the suggestion with no real conviction.
#
Jumanji means ‘many effects’ in Zulu
#
“Where Is the Name Ketanji From?”
@LH, McW asked YOU, where the name is from:) He wondered about this name, and titled his podcast accordingly.
Stranger in a Strange Land — first book I read in English, age 11. I’m strangely tempted to read it again, but I may not be as able to ignore the politics as I was then.
A long long ways from West Africa, the lexeme (or at least the character string) KETANJI apparently appears in a 1984 volume titled _Study kelayakan bekas ibu kota Kerajaan Wajo (abad XVII) di Tosora, Kab. Wajo, Sulawesi Selatan_, which Google Translate renders as “Feasibility study of the former capital of the Wajo Kingdom (XVII century) in Tosora, Wajo Regency, South Sulawesi.” But due to the limitations of “snippet view,” I can’t see the context in which the character string appears and can’t even make an intelligent guess as to whether it seems to be a proper noun (whether personal name or toponym) or something else.
ETA: Per Indonesian Wikipedia, “Ketangi” with a “g” is the name of multiple villages in Java, none of which have been thought notable enough to have an English version of the article devoted to them. Although the “Ketangi” in Madhya Pradesh gets an English-wiki article.
Didn’t General Electric trademark that in 1951?
Not a problem. America had an actual president named after a vacuum cleaner.
Apparently, in Kimbundu (Angola) kitanji means “abastado; opulento; rico”, which seems like a plausible meaning for a personal name. But I offer the suggestion with no real conviction.
Hey, it’s the most plausible thing we’ve gotten yet.
FWIW my admittedly subjective nominees for the prior U.S. Supreme Court justices with the most unusual (in an essentially statistical sense – no aesthetic judgment implied) given names.
1. Bushrod Washington (born 1762, joined Court in 1798)
2. Salmon P. Chase (1808, 1864)*
3. Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (1825, 1888)
4. Mahlon Pitney (1858, 1912)**
5. Potter Stewart (1915, 1958)***
Now, some of these are of course the output of well-established naming patterns even if the specific output seems exotic. E.g. 1 & 5 were simply given their mothers’ maiden name as a first name.****
*Whose father’s name was Ithamar Chase.
**Who was Mahlon IV, so it was not an uncommon name in his specific family.
***Not one of those WASPy names which seems equally cromulent in either order because “Stewart Potter” would be significantly less unusual-feeling.
****There are lots of other justices whose first names were repurposed surnames which were not necessarily super-common in that transferred context but for whatever subjective reasons the likes of Pierce Butler, Harlan Stone, and Thurgood Marshall don’t strike me as quite as noteworthy as Bushrod/Mahlon/Potter.
Learned Hand never got to be on the Supreme Court, though you might have thought that with a name like that he’d have been a shoo-in.
Since I’ve played volleyball with someone named Mahlon (/’meɪlən/) (Ruth 1:2 et seq., apparently) (he was better than I was), the name doesn’t sound as strange to me as Potter or Thurgood or especially Salmon or Bushrod.
Behind the Name says the given name Pierce derives from the surname Pierce, which derives from the given name Piers, like the plowman. So there’s no continuity between the given name and the given name?
Ketanji Brown Jackson has just published Lovely One: A Memoir. The key quote, which I fear will give much displeasure, is this:
Other relevant tidbits:
The Peace Corps aunt was her mother’s sister Carolynn, who was based in Liberia when KBJ was born. Carolynn planned a six-week Africa trip for KBJ’s parents when KBJ was two; the itinerary was “from Ghana to Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, and Liberia, allowing them to meet, sometimes stay with, and be shown around by friends my aunt had made in each place”. Whether Carolynn met these friends in Liberia or in the other places I cannot tell.
KBJ has a younger brother named Ketajh Mikobi, which her parents said meant “son of a king”.
Perhaps it is not Ketanji but the full “Ketanji Onyika” which means “Lovely One”. Or perhaps each separately means it in a different language.
Okay, wikipedia advises me that “Mahlon” has not been quite as historically rare in American onomastics (outside the Pitney family) as I had supposed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahlon
There’s a bit of an oddity in the early verses of the Book of Ruth. Naomi’s sons are introduced in verse two as Mahlon and Chilion, given in that order. Then in verse four they are said to marry the Moabitesses Orpah and Ruth, given in that order, before they (the husbands) up and die in verse five. But the rabbinical (haggadic, whatever …) tradition is apparently that Mahlon married Ruth and Chilion married Orpah, which is not what I would have supposed from the text. But that may just indicate that I am bringing some sort of inapplicable culture-bound presupposition to the text.
ETA: the biblical “Salmon” of course pops up in the final chapter of the (very short) Book of Ruth, as the father of Ruth’s second husband Boaz.
@ David E.: Among U.S. federal judges who did not serve on the Supreme Court, I daresay Learned Hand was outdone in the naming department by the Honorable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_Sanders .
Mikobi appears to be a name in Congo; Carolynn was transferred from Liberia to Zaire as was in 1972/3
“Ketanji” and “Onyika” both actually look rather more Lingaloid than West African, but that date seems too late for the origin story to work. Maybe for the brother.
“King” in Lingala is in fact mokonji, though.
“Ketajh” doesn’t look like anything at all. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a Volta-Congo language in which it’s even a possible word. Still, as KBJ says, there are indeed thousands of “dialects” out there to indulge one’s fantasies with. Actual knowledge would only cramp the creativity.
I did once know a German/Sri Lankan couple who gave their daughter an absolutely genuine (and indeed, appropriate) Kusaal name. Mind you, they were living in Bawku at the time little Talata arrived.
The key quote, which I fear will give much displeasure
Not at all; it’s admirably Pyrrhonian (epoché): “We have no way of knowing which of the thousands of dialects spoken on the mother continent is the source of my name, and we have never managed to trace its linguistic origins.” She could easily have left that out.
(Come to that, we too were living in Bawku when my own daughter was born: but, unlike Talata, my daughter was actually born in Aberdeen, like all good children.)
It is smaller and newer than Aberdeen, Scotland, but the default “Aberdeen” in my own mind probably remains Aberdeen, Maryland, because it’s close to where I grew up. That’s the location of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberdeen_Proving_Ground, where the U.S. Army tests new weapons (sometimes resulting in loud explosions you can hear at considerable distance), which may or may not make it a symbolically appropriate place for good children to be born.
Eartha, Raina.
(Both mercifully rare.)
I read not long ago that in Sweden there’s been a trend away from the traditional consonant-heavy female names, which tend to end in consonants, to vowel-rich, vowel-final ones, especially Linnéa.
I suppose one cannot completely exclude the possibility that Aunt Carolynn earnestly and sincerely asked some local folks for helpful suggestions for appropriate baby names and certain non-benevolent local folks decided to play a trick on the American lady. Such things have been known to happen. OTOH we don’t yet have any suggestion of “Ketanji” meaning something comically-inappropriate in some language that is extant in Liberia …
@J.W.: I cannot forbear to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenesaw_Mountain_Landis .
But are you telling me that Salmon Portland Chase, who was named after one of his many uncles, a resident of Portland, Maine, was ultimately named after Boaz’s father and not a fish?
Eartha, Raina
Probably the most famous Eartha?
I think I can concoct a Vai a nyi ka meaning something like “her beauty opens.”
Play the game for yourselves …
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015038069863&seq=1
Koelle was a remarkable man. Given the limitations of his circumstances, what he achieved was quite extraordinary. And he invented the name “Gur.” (It’s not a great grammar, though.)
Vai is spoken in Liberia. (On the other hand, it is also famous for its script, and thus likely to spring to mind for Afrocentrists anyway as an archetypal African Dialect to attribute mysterious words to.)
perhaps each separately means it in a different language
I wondered about that. One of the many implausible features of this story is that “ketanji onyika” is too phonologically elaborate and just too damn long to mean just “lovely one.” I mean, sure, it’s possible that there are West African languages out there where the word for a contentless dummy pronoun “one” is trisyllabic, but none comes to mind …
On the other hand, it could be the same thing twice, or some sort of poetic kenning or proverb (in which case it’s a pity that the actual literal meaning was not recorded alongside the denatured “lovely one.”)
The Igbo name Onyeka can be parsed as ònye “who?” kà “is better, greater”, based on Williamson’s dictionary. Apparently it’s understood as having an implicit direct object – “who is greater than God?”
“Michael”, effectively.
@Jerry Friedman: anything’s possible. But the fact that the more famous Salmon’s father (brother of the uncle) was named Ithamar (see, e.g., Lev. 10:6) tends to be consistent with the Old-Testament theory rather than the piscine theory. It appears that Ithamar and Uncle Salmon’s other siblings were named Mercy, Lois, Abigail, Baruch, Alice, Dudley, Ruth, and (the baby of the family) Philander. That’s the Rt. Rev. Philander Chase, who took a not-so-Puritanical version of the Gospel to the former Northwest Territory as the Prot. Episc. Church’s first Bishop of Ohio and then its first Bishop of Illinois.* Despite its theologically-impeccable etymology, “Philander” has not flourished as a given name in more recent times, with the youngest of the eight examples given on wikipedia’s list having been born in 1866. I expect the pejorative overtones of the verb “to philander” skunked it.
*Brother Dudley stayed in New England and served two non-consecutive stints as a U.S. Senator from Vermont, with a time as Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court in between.*
EDITED TO ADD: I’d always thought of “Lois” as a mid-20th-century secular-sounding name (Lois Lane, etc.), so it seemed a bit out of place in this list, But it turns out that I was insufficiently familiar with 2 Timothy 1:5, in which St. Paul reminisces about St. Timothy’s grandma, who was named Lois. Well, Λωΐς, although as mentioned by St. Paul she’s in the dative case.
Well, Λωΐς, although as mentioned by St. Paul she’s in the dative case.
Looey ??
@Stu: the dative is transliterated as “Lōidi.” That intrusive-seeming /d/ is in the stem exemplified by the genitive singular but not visible in the nominative.
In a sobering reminder of how rough the actuarial tables could be back then even for Americans who were wealthy and well-connected, the famous Salmon Chase was widowed three times and only two of his five daughters survived past childhood. The daughters had rather unexotic names, though: Catherine, Katherine (born shortly after Catherine’s death), Lizzie, Janet, and Josephine.
Oops. I vaguely remembered a terminal -i in some dative form. I now realize that “dative” is a crib – give a “d” in the dative.
@DM:
The only Linnéa I’ve met was born in the mid-90s, but among my former colleagues at Umeå universitet (all of them children of the 70s or earlier) female names ending in -a were quite commonplace: i remember Pia, Annika, Sara, Eva, Helena, Katarina among others. At least in my memory they outnumber the consonant-final ones (Märit, Liv).
The Igbo name Onyeka can be parsed as ònye “who?” kà “is better, greater”
Kusaal anɔ’ɔnɛ gat …
Sadly, I’m pretty sure that both parts are just accidental soundalikes, even “who?”
I haven’t managed to reconstruct “who?” even to proto-Oti-Volta. The most closely related languages just use the human singular demonstrative pronoun for it (= Kusaal on), along with their usual markers for content questions. Mooré has ãnda, Gulmancema has ŋmá, Mbelime has awa. Buli has wana, bana, sina and tina, which just look like the third person pronouns with a suffix -na.
Waddya mean, “core vocabulary”?
“What?”, on the other hand, goes way back to Central Gur, if not farther. I suspect it’s got something to do with the noun-class system, with an actual interrogative pronoun only available for “Unclassified.” “What formless thing?”, perhaps, but only ever “which person?”, “which animal?” or whatever.
This is my theory, which is mine.
OMG it’s David Elk !
Better than David Icke.
> She could easily have left that out.
Yes I was happy with her answer, much better than McWhorter’s filibustering.
It’s also the case that even if she suspects (as well she may) that her aunt’s African linguistic investigations may have lacked a certain rigour, she is hardly going to denounce the lady for it in her memoir.
And her name does mean “lovely one” if her parents say so, even (or perhaps, especially) if it never existed in any actual African language at all.
The first Philander I heard of was Dennis Rodman’s father, who lived down to the name.
The feminine-in-a meme is so well established that sci-fi writers even extend it to their girl extraterrestrials. But really it’s our own fault: you tell a layman “oh, it’s just an Indo-European thing” and then they ask why Arabic and Hebrew do it too, and you expect them to believe it’s a big coincidence? Very poorly written planet.
Hausa too.
But the fact that the more famous Salmon’s father (brother of the uncle) was named Ithamar (see, e.g., Lev. 10:6) tends to be consistent with the Old-Testament theory rather than the piscine theory. It appears that Ithamar and Uncle Salmon’s other siblings were named Mercy, Lois, Abigail, Baruch, Alice, Dudley, Ruth, and (the baby of the family) Philander. That’s the Rt. Rev. Philander Chase, who took a not-so-Puritanical version of the Gospel to the former Northwest Territory as the Prot. Episc. Church’s first Bishop of Ohio and then its first Bishop of Illinois.*
Thanks, J.W. Now the question is how Salmon Chase’s first name was pronounced.
Incidentally, another of the Rt. Rev. Philander Chase’s accomplishments was founding Kenyon College. The college says he got the name from Edward Young’s formerly famous poem Night Thoughts, but it says his siblings were also named after characters in that poem, and I don’t see their names in the Gutenberg version.
And her name does mean “lovely one” if her parents say so, even (or perhaps, especially) if it never existed in any actual African language at all.
Well, that brings us to the meaning of “mean”. Judging by the title of her memoir, I’d say that her parents’ belief that it means “lovely one” is very important to her, much more important than the possibility that it doesn’t mean that in any language. But I don’t think I’d go farther than that. For some purposes it’s the thought that counts, but not for all.
Since we’re doing Ithamars, Philanders, and the like, I can’t resist mentioning Othniel Marsh, who crops up in this lively piece by Kerry Howley in New York Magazine (archived) about skulduggery among skull-diggers… er, that is, paleontologists:
“Looking to the future. “A girl’s name ending in ‘a’—that always suggests a ‘C’ cup.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land”
— Ewwww. Please don’t quote this as if it were innocuous. Heinlen’s ‘politics’ are also on display right here in terms of his sexism. Imagine if this were a quote about a nearly-ubiquitous characteristic of boys’ names and referred to genital sizes or some such. How would you feel finding this reference just peppered in with otherwise delightful comments and musings on diasporic onosmatics?!?
I realize that I’m not a bona fide member of this community, merely a frequent dropper-inner, so forgive my swoop-in complaining.
Completely unrelatedly:
I am a cultural anthropologist currently paying the rent via market research and am encountering some intriguing aspects of the lingo of this new-to-me field that I can’t tell if anyone’s written about. For example, the use of “that” in place of “the” in sales rep speech. Sort of a folksy way of disarming their interlocutor? A holdover from some Scandinavian language structure that influences marketing speech via the MidWestern headquarters of US industry? I’m finding it impossible to find any info via googling “that instead of the” and wondered what you all think.
Another excerpt of Hattic interest from the Kerry Howley article:
Gotta like that guy!
I realize that I’m not a bona fide member of this community, merely a frequent dropper-inner, so forgive my swoop-in complaining.
Nonsense — anyone who comments here is a bona fide member of this community, and I agree that that quote is a good example of Heinlein’s revolting sexism (just one of his unpleasant traits). But I’m pretty sure Jerry wasn’t endorsing the idea, just citing it for its name-ending-in-a relevance.
To Deb’s other question re “that” where one would expect “the,” I can’t really comment without some specific examples to get a better sense of what she’s seeing. But I would note that there are multiple languages where the current definite article (“the”) historically developed out of a bleaching of a demonstrative (“that”). One can imagine someone with a certain sort of business/sales/rah-rah worldview thinking that using “that” instead of “the” would make a given sentence more dramatic/emphatic, and then overuse that trick until the emphasis-adding meaning got bleached out of it.
@Deb:
Bona fides is attained by commenting. Ergo …
I agree about Stranger in a Strange Land, which I failed to finish, despite being at the time quite a fan. I never really attempted the later novels, of which that one is a kind of foreboding.
I don’t find that Heinlein wears well as the years go by. With some of his contemporaries, you can fairly comfortably ignore a bit of rebarbative politics (or retro social attitudes), but with Heinlein, the trouble is that he really means it – and tells you so.
I find that annoying even in cases where I actually share an author’s preachy views.
[Ninja’d by Hat. All the better!]
The words put in a character’s mouth are not always a reflection of the author’s opinion, but they’re not never a reflection. “It was a different time…” (yeah, the future).
Japanese would seem one plausible counterexample to the “there are lots of given names ending in -a and they are overwhelmingly female” generalization. There, you sometimes need to look at the whole last syllable. E.g., you can’t generalize about names ending -o but names ending -ko are generally female while names ending -rō are generally male. I thought maybe Georgian would be another counterexample, on the basis of people always assuming incorrectly that the very common girl’s name Nino ought to be Nina, but apparently there are other common Georgian female names than do end in -a.
Incidentally, so otherworldly and pure of heart am I, that while I supposed from the context that a ‘C cup’ is larger than average, my attempts to verify this by consulting the Intertubes led me into a maze of impenetrable complexity regarding bra sizes which led me to wonder how anyone ever gets one that actually fits. I had no idea …
Oh, it’s quite a subject. Some useful info here.
It has been some decades since I re-read any Heinlein and if I were going to start doing so, SIASL is not where I’d probably start. But FWIW here’s the fuller context of the quote:
As MADAME VESANT LEFT THE SCREEN Jubal Harshaw leaned back from his phone. “Front,” he said.
“Okay, Boss,” Miriam acknowledged.
“This is one for the ‘Real-Experiences’ group. Specify on the cover sheet that I want the narrator to have a sexy contralto voice-”
“Maybe I should try out for it.”
“Not that sexy. Shut up. Dig out that list of null surnames we got from the Census Bureau, pick one and put an innocent, mammalian first name with it, for the pen name. A girl’s name ending in ‘a’-that always suggests a ‘C’ cup.”
“Huh! And not one of us with a name ending in ‘a.’ Why, you louse!”
“Flat-chests bunch, aren’t you? ‘Angela.’ Her name is ‘Angela.’ Title: ‘I Married a Martian.’ Start: All my life I had longed to become an astronaut. Paragraph. When I was just a tiny thing, with freckles on my nose and stars in my eyes, I saved box tops just as my brothers did – and cried when Mummy wouldn’t let me wear my Space Cadet helmet to bed. Paragraph. In those carefree childhood days I did not dream to what strange, bittersweet fate my tomboy ambition would-”
[then he gets interrupted]
Observations:
1. The character who utters the sentence is not the title-character-hero, but OTOH is the wise-older-man-providing-guidance figure who can be assumed with some plausibility to be a stand-in for the author.
2. The character appears to be maybe exploiting existing lowbrow cultural stereotypes for commercial purposes without necessarily endorsing them, although I’m sure there’s much else about his speech and conduct over the course of the novel that would alarm a U.S. employer’s HR/compliance staff in the present day.
To David E.’s puzzlement, by the time of my own American adolescence you needed to reference “D-cup” if you wanted to stereotypically evoke larger-than-average size (this without much evidence-based empirical knowledge of the actual statistical distribution of sizes among actual brassiere wearers, of course). But maybe things were otherwise 20+ years earlier when the book was written. Or maybe (I really don’t have a strong intuition here) the “C-cup” stereotype here was supposed to be evoking something closer to median – perfectly normal and “mammalian” w/o being noteworthy for being larger than median? The point from context would seem to be that the pen name affixed to the pulpy fake-true-confession story was presumably supposed to be of help in marketing the story to a predominantly female audience.
I do NOT recall any stereotypes purporting to find correlations between particular common female first names and bosom size, which isn’t to say that none such existed.
All the women in my own family* end decently in consonants. Female names ending in -a, are (not to put too fine a point on it) Foreign, if not actually American, and nothing would surprise me about the exotic bearers of such dubious names.
* Apart from daughter-in-law, who is Foreign (though unquestionably decent, and not American at all), thus proving my point. Also, she usually goes by a short form ending in a consonant, thereby confirming her general soundness.
— Ewwww. Please don’t quote this as if it were innocuous. Heinlen’s ‘politics’ are also on display right here in terms of his sexism. Imagine if this were a quote about a nearly-ubiquitous characteristic of boys’ names and referred to genital sizes or some such. How would you feel finding this reference just peppered in with otherwise delightful comments and musings on diasporic onosmatics?!?
Sorry I grossed you out inadvertently. That quotation is what the “names ending in ‘a'” reminded me of, and I thought it was a humorous way of suggesting, if anything, that that nice Mr. McGregor wanted a name for his daughter that sounded traditionally feminine.
However, I can recall a comment in Time Enough for Love that someone who could choose a body “could have been built like Joe Colossus and hung like a stallion mule” (in that future, fertile mules have been engineered), and a mention in Friday of Las Vegas showboys with “padded codpieces”, and those didn’t bother me. There might be more that I don’t recall.
With some of his contemporaries, you can fairly comfortably ignore a bit of rebarbative politics (or retro social attitudes), but with Heinlein, the trouble is that he really means it – and tells you so.
The words put in a character’s mouth are not always a reflection of the author’s opinion, but they’re not never a reflection.
As you can tell, I’ve read and reread a lot of Heinlein. I don’t think he means what his sympathetic characters say as much as might appear. That applies even to the Wise Old characters (mostly male). Having once been criticized for saying Heinlein believed what he wrote in apparently heartfelt non-fiction, I’ve gotten more skeptical about his preaching. But I’m not an expert—I haven’t read any biography of him, or Grumbles from the Grave—and I’m not going to get into this unless there’s interest.
@Deb: On the other subject, I’ve been quite successful at insulating myself from sales reps. Can you give an example of “that” for “the”?
how Salmon Chase’s first name was pronounced
the same as “suleiman”, i hope!
The words put in a character’s mouth are not always a reflection of the author’s opinion, but they’re not never a reflection.
heinlein, in particular, rarely leaves any ambiguity, especially with the presentation of his far-right politics (which his misogyny was a central part of) – he’s perversely brechtian in how he clearly he makes visible his attitude to the character and their words. the “mammalian” would be a discursive giveaway to me that it’s him talking through harshaw there, even if the words weren’t in the mouth of his favorite self-insert character. having read a fair amount of him as a young person, and more about him later on (most recently in alex nevala-lee’s fascinating and frustrating Astounding, and (by ear) in The Empire Never Ended podcast’s excellent episodes on him), he’s high on my list of Historically Important Writers that should only be read for research purposes, like william luther pierce or thomas dixon.
Quite so, and I recommend the Nevala-Lee book to all and sundry. (See my appalled reaction to the portrayal of Asimov here.)
I would have said my late first wife had a name ending in -a but then I somewhat belatedly recalled that that name, which was the only one I ever used with her, was strictly speaking a nickname, and her legal first name ended phonetically in a sibilant and orthographically in a silent e. My present wife’s first name ends in -y, which is epicene in the U.S. for nickname forms (Bobby etc. balanced with Sally etc.), but probably a more strongly female marker for base/lemma names. One of my daughters likewise has a first name ending in -y, the other one ending in an -l. The -l is not for her generation a particularly reliable signal of sex. If you look solely at orthography there’s a not-overwhelming male majority (comparing the 250 most common male names for her year of birth with the 250 most common female ones) but if you look at pronunciation and disregard word-final silent e’s there’s a not-overwhelming female majority in the same set.
I have not read the Nevala-Lee book but I should have thought it obvious that anyone who wanted to have any sort of naive and innocent enjoyment of pulpy sf as unpretentious and entertaining genre fiction ought to avoid like the plague the dubious milieu of organized sf fandom and conventions and whatnot.
It is certainly not an immutable fact that organized sf fandom and conventions must be sexist hellholes; these things are managed much better now (though there are still scandals of other natures).
I would view “sexist hellhole” as merely one possible/contingent surface manifestation of a deeper structural problem, but probably don’t want to go further off on this tangent to avoid perhaps giving offense to many valued contributors to the Hattery.
And obviously the subcultures of obsessive fans of more high-status literary genres can have problems of their own, with e.g. campus readings by Famous Visiting Poets having a certain historical association with groping incidents etc.
SIASL was one of the last SF books I read; that is, that finally turned me off the genre for good. Even though I was 20 or so, I thought it was sophomoric, shallow proto-hippie stuff, which stood out by how sure the author was of his profundity. I don’t remember the sexism but I probably noticed it and it would have strengthened my impression.
Female names ending in -a, are (not to put too fine a point on it) Foreign, …
Victoria (as in Queen)? I suppose counts as German but not American. Tread carefully: i have a sister, who’s a good egg. Goes by ‘Vicky’.
Learned Hand almost certainly would have been on the Supreme Court, had Taft (who was chief justice after his presidency) not hated him personally.
Separately, Stranger in a Strange Land is probably Heinlein’s best work, but I am firmly determined not to reread it. I don’t particularly like Heinlein’s style or his plots, and his gross politics are too central to the novels to be brushed past.
And I tend to forget that the Nazi war criminal was named Henlein, not Heinlein.
What could be a more English name for a baby girl than a good old fashioned one like e.g. Etheldreda?* Or even the pre-Saxon Boadicea?** Of course, there are clippings, what with Modern People always being in such a rush. My mother, for example, has the consonant-final name Susan, because somewhere along the way people lost the patience for the extra syllable in the older (and Biblical) form Susanna[h]. You may say that Biblical names are in a certain sense Foreign, but tell that to the British Israelites …
*Also now an African name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etheldreda_Nakimuli-Mpungu
**Wikipedia prefers the spelling Boudica, which seems less elegant.
Boadicea
Ah: Buddug.
https://cy.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddug_(Boudica)
Ends in a consonant, as is only right and proper.
(The name is also the One True Form of “Victoria.”)
“Philander” has not flourished as a given name in more recent times, with the youngest of the eight examples given on wikipedia’s list having been born in 1866. I expect the pejorative overtones of the verb “to philander” skunked it.
A college roommate of mine (born1966) bears the middle name Philander. He inherited it from his father, who was a genuine first name Philander and just the latest of Philanders in an old New England family. But to your point, my roommate’s mother put her foot down when it came to the newest male descendant and gave him the very Gen X name “David” instead. She just thought “Philander” was stuffy and old fashioned. The father always went by “Phi” though, which struck me as a great “Old Yale” kind of name.
“Philander” is stressed on the first syllable and uses the “pie” vowel, so at least avoids overt audible associations with marital infidelity.
See my appalled reaction to the portrayal of Asimov
Wow. Having gone down that rabbit hole, not sure what to think. Asimov was a sick man who can’t be excused. That said, there appears to have been a shocking amount of tacit acceptance and encouragement from the men around him. I suspect Isaac truly believed he was “amusing and cute”, which is very sad.
Asimov’s behavior also fit rather neatly into the 1950s-60s comedic stereotype of the perpetually horny, sexually unattractive Jewish male, that Woody Allen, Roth, and Mel Brooks all tapped into. I suspect that made it easier for gentiles to accept his behavior and laugh at him in a way that was probably far more condescending than Asimov was aware.
The Social Security Administration’s massive baby names database reports that twelve 1966-born U.S. males were given the first name Philander, so rare is not non-existent. Unfortunately that database doesn’t track middle names and I’m not aware of one that does and “family names” that seem a bit too old-fashioned being shunted into the middle-name slot does seem a plausible mechanism. In 1966 you needed, on the boys’ side, 53 instances of a name to make the top 1000 and 54 to definitely make it. (Because nine different names had 53 instances, only the first three in alphabetical order were listed in the top 1000.)
Comparative figures for 1966 for some other names mentioned upthread:
49 Luciuses (Lucii?), albeit not necessarily with the “Quintus Cincinnatus” follow-on.
28 Mahlons
No reported Bushrods, Ithamars, Potters, or Salmons, although a name needs five instances for a given sex for a given year to be included in the “extended” version of the database so that need not mean literally zero.
And I am reminded again that the data in the database is not 100% error-free. There are said to be in 1966 e.g. 48 male babies named Angela and 45 named Barbara, and as I have noted before I think the more likely explanation is a small but non-zero number of babies being miscoded for sex when entered into the database than a small but non-zero number of parents thinking those could be epicene names. (By comparison there are 18,533 Angelas and 13,123 Barbaras coded as female, so the sex-coding was pretty good even if not 100%.)
“Philander” is stressed on the first syllable and uses the “pie” vowel
Thanks for that, I would never have guessed!
That said, there appears to have been a shocking amount of tacit acceptance and encouragement from the men around him.
Absolutely. The older I get, the more I realize how sickeningly sexist the world of my childhood was. It took a lot of hard work to drag myself out of that swamp by the scruff of my own neck.
to let off steam
ending in -a,
(This seems as good a recent thread as any to dump my outrage.)
gens Aelia seems a noble enough name. Then how did it get attached to this drivel?
In further evidence that I have hitherto been systematically blind to the recurrent presence of “Mahlon” as a given name in the U.S., I just in a totally different context had my attention called to the 1957 LP record _Music for Playboys to Play By_ (notable for its cover art if not its musical content), by the Hollywood Playboys Orchestra. Which “orchestra” was directed by Mahlon Merrick (1900-1969). https://www.discogs.com/release/6479758-Hollywood-Playboys-Orchestra-Russ-TaylorSportsmen-QuartetteQuartet-Mahlon-Merrick-Music-For-Playboys
There is a Rev. Mahlon Potts in Elmer Gantry.
The biblical Mahlon was the late husband of Ruth, in her eponymous book.
There’s a bit before the first quote from the New York Magazine article above:
*Sends up the local palaeontologist signal for a fact check*
@Y: As J.W. Brewer notes above, there’s no actual indication in the text of Ruth itself whether Mahlon’s wife was Ruth or Orpah.
@J.W. Brewer: The last verse in the book, which gives the family tree information, is probably a somewhat later addition to the text, dating to after the propaganda purpose of the book (defending David’s forbidden Moabite ancestry) had become less automatically obvious to readers.
Sorry, I missed JWB’s earlier comment.
Ruth 4:10 explicitly says that Ruth was Mahlon’s wife.
Is the name Marlon a hypercorrection of Mahlon?
@Y: Whoops! You’re right, obviously.
There seem to be a whole bunch of suggestions for the origin of the name Marlon, none tremendously convincing. It could be from English merlin, in the sense of a pigeon hawk,* but that seems sonewhat unlikely phonologically. Another popular suggestion is that it arose in French as a diminutive of Mark, but the suffixing is unusual. Welsh meaning “fortress of the sea” sounds extremely fishy.
* In my household, this sense of merlin is less associated with the actual bird and much more with the Rolls Royce engine named after it. The company named its airplane engines after birds of prey, and the merlin was used in a huge number of British aircraft during the war, including craft in essentially all roles: Lancasters, Halifaxes, Mosquitos, Spitfires, and Hurricanes.
As we’re instancing Mahlons, I had an English professor at Marshall in the 60s named Mahlon C. Brown. I’m not quite sure how he pronounced it; maybe Maylon. But he was always Mal Brown to his friends.
Early 19th century occurrences of Marlon seem to be all as a French surname.
Interestingly the Brits give the second syllable a full /ɒ/ while Americans reduce it to schwa, the reverse of words like python and Amazon (though aligning with condom).
It could be from English merlin, in the sense of a pigeon hawk,
I think the old American name “pigeon hawk” for the Merlin is unfortunate, since the Merlin is a falcon, not a hawk. They’re not even placed in the same order any more.
As you can see, in my rented household of one, “merlin” is associated much more with the bird than with the engine. I even think I saw one yesterday.
@Jerry Friedman: The definition of hawk that does not include falcons is a relatively modern innovation. The older definition refers to a paraphyletic grouping, but so do many traditional terms, like fish.
Including… English.
(Very few languages have definite articles that have clearly not developed from demonstratives.)
As far as I understand, many people never get one that really fits (i.e. is comfortable to wear in the long run); it’s a skill that is specially taught to people who e.g. work at Victoria’s Secret.
I don’t think the field is nastier than others, except insofar as “the closer you get to humans, the worse the science gets” applies; anything remotely similar to the Bone Wars* is unthinkable today, and anyone as nasty as Owen is hard to imagine; and I haven’t, for what little that’s worth, personally encountered or heard of more than at most one narcissist (but I’ll pay attention – Per is in my field specifically, so he may have been talking about people I do know). As elsewhere in science, however, you get people who want total control over a department or a tiny subfield or something; you get people who ruin the lives/careers of their doctoral students because they’re simply unable to explain what they want in a thesis or, conversely, because they don’t care about all or some of their students; you get people who abuse their power for plagiarism**; and you get people who abuse their power for sexual harassment.
Some of the nicest people have worked on Tyrannosaurus rex, though, too.
* BTW, Othniel Charles Marsh didn’t like his given names and mostly went by O. C.; Edward Drinker Cope never seems to have used his middle name either, AFAIK, though in 1990 he did get a dinosaur named Drinker after him – it’s a close relative of Othnielosaurus. Both Marsh and Cope published huge numbers of very short descriptions of lots of fossils, often the same species 2 or 5 times in a row in the cases where we can even tell what the species are because some of the specimens are simply undiagnostic fragments.
** One of them allegedly wanted to have more publications than Cope’s > 1,400, which would also explain a few other things.
Disclaimer in a separate comment because of all the links: I’m an academic descendant of Cope. It goes: Cope > Osborn* > Gregory > Romer > Carroll > Reisz** > Laurin > me.
* Apparently stiflingly authoritative – there doesn’t seem to have been a way to publicly disagree with him as long as he was alive. Once described as “the only man capable of strutting while sitting down”.
** Do read the talk page.
@Brett: True “hawk” excluding falcons is relatively modern—the first citation in the OED showing that some people made the distinction is from 1879. On the other hand, I don’t see why that date is relevant to whether “pigeon hawk” is a good term for the merlin now. Also that sense of “pigeon hawk” isn’t that much older (first citation 1782, from T. Jefferson).
Since that thread on Muskogean was revived, I read the original post. Don’t get me started on “chickenhawk” and “chicken snake”, but I wonder what the “civet cat” was. Maybe the American mink? Wikipedia notes that Cabeza de Vaca reported that the chief of a tribe he encountered wore skins of the “civet-marten”, and the mink is about as close as you can get to a marten in the Southeast.
TIL that falcons are the ones with tomial teeth (hooked beaks) that they use for killing prey, whereas hawks and eagles use their claws.
Also, in Danish mediaeval lays the falcon was usually called høg — it looks like the distinction was introduced when hunting with falcons became a royal sport. (The Danish kings maintained a falkonergård not far from where I live).
Yes, falcons have tomial “teeth” and hawks and eagles (and buzzards in the non-North-American sense, harriers, kites, and vultures) don’t, but all of those birds have hooked beaks. The tomial tooth is a ridge on each side of the beak that falcons and their relatives use to break the spines of their prey. https://peregrinefund.org/curved-beaks