Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In the news recently (thanks to the Boston Marathon bombing), the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (thanks to Dzhokhar Tsernaev’s having gone to high school there), with a name that strikes many non-locals as rather odd: Rindge and Latin, coordinated in the name, are indeed both nouns, but they aren’t semantically parallel: Rindge is a family name, Latin the name of a language. Things used to be worse.

And then there’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Rindge and Latin is a merger:

The Cambridge Rindge and Latin School is a public high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts …

In 1977, two separate schools called the Rindge Technical School and Cambridge High and Latin School, merged to become what today is known as Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS). (link)

Now, Rindge:

The Rindge Technical School was first established in 1888 as the Cambridge Manual Training School as a result of a donation to the town made the previous year by Frederick H. Rindge.  Rindge stated that he wished “the plain arts of industry to be taught…for boys of average talents, who may in it learn how their arms and hands can earn food, clothing, and shelter…”  This school, renamed in 1899 as the Rindge Manual Training School, became the first manual training school in Massachusetts.  Boys were taught firefighting, woodworking, drafting, and various other technical trades.  Academic courses such as language, mathematics, and science were taught at Cambridge English High School.  The school, along with Cambridge Latin School, was one of the first local schools to participate in formal athletic competition. (link)

And Latin:

The Cambridge High School was divided in 1886: its classical department became the Cambridge Latin School and its remaining departments the Cambridge English High School. The English High School was located at the corner of Broadway and Fayette Streets, while the Latin School was transferred to the Lee Street church, which had been renovated to receive it.

The division produced the Cambridge High & Latin School, with a name that was syntactically odd, coordinating as it did the adjective high and the noun Latin. I suppose we should be thankful that the the earlier events didn’t produce the Cambridge English High and Latin School, and that the 1977 merger didn’t produce the Cambridge Rindge & High & Latin School, or, worse, the Cambridge Rindge Technical & High & Latin School.

Which brings me to Brigham and Women’s, discussed on Language Log back in 2005 by Geoff Pullum:

Bill Poser stopped to chat at the water cooler in 1 Language Log Plaza the other day, and remarked that the ugly coordinative name “Brigham & Women’s Hospital”, which appears to coordinate items in different grammatical functions (attributive modifier and determiner, respectively), could have been worse, much worse. What is now the Brigham and Women’s Hospital results from a series of three separate binary mergers of what were originally four hospitals:
— the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital
— the Robert Breck Brigham Hospital
— the Boston Lying In Hospital
— the Free Hospital for Women
If you merged those last two you have had “the Free and Boston Lying In Hospital for Women”, or “the Boston Lying In and Free Hospital for Women”, or any of a number of other awkward names. A merger of the first and third might have produced “the Peter Bent and Boston Lying In Hospital” or “the Boston Lying In and Peter Bent Hospital”… So perhaps we were lucky.

(On a personal note: my daughter was born in Boston Lying In Hospital, as it was then.)

This entry was posted on April 25, 2013 at 7:58 am and is filed under Coordination, 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.