Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s One Big Happy, in which Ruthie deals with personal names:

For kids, personal names are the main identifiers for their friends; for some time, in fact, kids don’t even know their friends’ family names, but kids live in relatively small face-to-face groups, and personal names continue to be the main identifiers within these groups, even after kids learn family names for other purposes.

And so it is for adults in such groups. From a posting of mine to ADS-L on 9/18/06:

Yale professor Charles Perrow, the author of the wonderful Normal Accidents, was known as Chick when he was an undergraduate at Black Rock College, and is sometimes so called today. The story, as I recall it, was that when he arrived at Black Rock, there was already a Charles, a Charlie, and a Chuck, and it was a small place, so he had to be something else, hence Chick.

It’s the same in the cartoon: red-haired Amber needs a new name. Ambie? Amba? Or what?

This entry was posted on December 9, 2014 at 6:33 am and is filed under Child language, 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.