Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The Zippy strip for today, 3/11, all about sharing a personal name (with some intrusions of the name Melvin):

The large generalization is that mentioning two people together implicates some special relationship, even more so if they share a name (personal name or family name)

In the first panel we start with two authors, from widely separated times, in different genres (plays vs. fiction), and with hugely different styles — but both with the personal name William.

The personal-name sharing goes on with wildly different characters, oddly yoked to one another: Oscar Wilde the writer and Oscar the Grouch the Muppet; Jackson Pollock the painter and Jackson Browne the rock musician (whose career started with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band); Mona Freeman the actress (and painter) and the Mona Lisa (the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting).

Still greater intimacy. Merely mentioning two names together implicates some special relationship. Even more so if the names are coordinated, syntactically connected. If I say I celebrate Jane Austen and Ludwig van Beethoven, you will wonder what connects them (answer: both were born on December 16th). Even more if they share a name; if I say I admire both Jane Austen and Jane Goodall, you will suppose some even stronger connection, hard to discern (like Jackson Pollock and Jackson Browne). (As it happens, I admire all four of these people, but that’s just a random fact about my tastes.)

And then if the coordination is simplified syntactically — in what’s known as coordination / conjunction reduction — you will suppose some even more intimate connection. That brings us to the puzzlement that can be presented by coordinated family names (Jane Austen and Goodall impress me; Jackson Pollock and Browne have many fans) and coordinated personal names (Jackson and Henry Pollock have few fans in New Zealand [Henry Pollock is an English rugby union player]; Arnold and Fay Zwicky are little-known in Scotland [Fay Zwicky is an Australian poet]).

It’s all about iconicity. The closer the syntactic connection between the names, the more intimate the conveyed association between the two people named.

But no, I have (at the moment) no explanation for the prevalence of Melvin, though I suspect he might be related to Alfred E. Neuman.

This entry was posted on March 11, 2026 at 7:59 am and is filed under Coordination, Iconicity, 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.