Arnold Zwicky's Blog

I’m not sure how much of this is about language, in particular names, but …

Here’s a recent Zippy with three Dingburgers sort of talking about theoretical physics: Leona Simsby, Lonnie Lomax, and Hubert Hadron.

Knowing Bill Griffith’s penchant for finding real people with names from some common domain (see here), especially names that Zippy would savor, I did some searching on those three, but found no common thread, and then (given the physics connections of the family name Hadron) tried to find physics connections for Simsby and Lomax, but without much success.

Lonnie Lomax is alliterative, like Hubert Hadron, but Leona Simsby isn’t. Leona Simsby suggests Leona Helmsley, but I see no parallel associations for the other two names (Lonnie Something-That-Sounds-Like-Lomax? Hubert-Something-That-Sounds-Like-Hadron?).

I am open for elucidation.

There might, of course, be no larger pattern. Nothing would keep Griffith from just pulling names out of the air, as it were.

This entry was posted on August 5, 2010 at 10:09 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Names. 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.