Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Ian Frazier’s “Fanshawe”, a humor piece in the November 2 New Yorker, begins:

Fanshawe had just the one name.

Later:

In college, Fanshawe’s social set had included an unusual number of men–Neuman,Farrel, Fogel, Harrison, Fegley, Carson, Foster, Ferguson, Sapers, Miles, Northon, Winslow–who were mononomes like himself.

Mononome is a wonderful morphological invention, immediately interpretable in context.

Fanshawe the mononome immediately reminded me of Mr. Spiggott in the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch “One Leg Too Few”, about a one-legged actor auditioning for the part of Tarzan, “a role which traditionally involves the use of a two-legged actor” and so wouldn’t normally be taken by a “unidexter”.

This entry was posted on November 5, 2009 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Language play, Morphology, Short shots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.