Language Log

In 1958 a Virginia couple were rousted from their bed in the middle of the night by a county sheriff, arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime of miscegenation, for which they were sentenced to a year in jail. With the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union, they appealed the conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, which on June 12, 1967 ruled unanimously that the Virginia law against inter-racial marriage violated the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution and overturned the convictions.

Mildred Loving passed away on May 2 at the age of 68.

In a couple of recent posts (here and here), I discussed cases where someone substitutes one person's name for another, on the basis of a relational analogy or associative similarity: sister for daughter, child for pet, ex-spouse for current spouse, and so on. A particularly interesting extension is the phenomenon of chains of incorrect names, often arranged in chronological or other stereotyped order. Some examples from readers' email:

My grandmother would often call me by a string of names: my mother’s name, then my aunt’s name (my grandmother’s other daughter) and then my name.
… my mother ran through the string of family thus: Mary Ann, Robert, Paul, John, Kitty, Pat. Mother did not make much pause between names, just stopped (usually) when she got to the one she wanted. Pat got added last, so she came in after whatever the current cat was. Mother always used Kitty for the cat.
… his mother was famous for doing the string-of-names thing when she wanted to call out to any of her 6 children, and Emmon as the youngest was usually on the receiving end of the longest string, “Stanley-David-Austin-Sven-Betty-Emmon!”
My name is often fourth or fifth in the chain of names I’m called, coming after my father and sister (almost always), my uncles (usually), and various other relatives (sometimes).
I am Italian and my grandmother used to have to go through the whole list of her six daughters’ names before saying mine. It occurred all the time she was addressing a close relative and it annoyed her enormously. Her daughters are now also doing it – it seems the older one gets, the more likely it happens. I can think of quite a few other people who do it, and they all seem to be women. And I would say it mainly occurs with relatives’ names.

I wondered whether there is any existing term — scientific or informal — for this chaining of family-members' names. It seems that the answer is "no", and so I've tentatively staked a terminological claim with the term "name chain". (If you felt the need for a term with more gravitas, you could try "onomastic catenation". But why would you, in a world where physicists spend billions on equipment to distinguish among the categories of quark known as up and down, charm and strange, top and bottom, and biologists pursue the sonic hedgehog gene?)

Something that we don't always think about is that names don't come by themselves but are part of a system with a certain structure. This is brought out by instances in which the names and the system of which they are a part come to be separated.

Carrier people used to have names that were wholly or partly meaningful in the Carrier language, but these died out very quickly once a resident priest arrived in 1865. The church gave people French saints' names on baptism, and these names immediately replaced the original Carrier names. Children ceased to receive a Carrier name.

Yesterday's post on analogical substitution of names has brought in quite a bit of email, but no information about an existing term for this phenomenon, and so I'm beginning to think that there isn't one. At least not a scientific name, and not a common name in English either. This is yet another demonstration that people can have thoughts for which they don't have (single) words. However, it's inconvenient to have conversations about things that you don't have terms for. Therefore, pending a better suggestion, I'll call these things "name chains".

The morning's email did bring several variations on the phenomenological theme.

Barbara Phillips Long writes:

I am on vacation with all but one of my siblings, some of their children and both of mine, my parents and some other relatives in a beach house in North Carolina.

I've already called my sister by my daughter's name and my daughter by my sister's name. Other people at the house have had similar problems. We were talking about it today and I suggested it was a problem based on categories — perhaps we think "nearest female relative" and the name of sister comes out instead of daughter.

Then my brother pointed out that there have been times he's gone to yell at his son for making mischief, only to hear the dog's name come out instead. That made me wonder if recently used names are in some sort of buffer that is more muscle memory than brain memory — something like playing piano or typing. In our family, at least, the name confusion happens when both names have been used recently — if I haven't talked to my sister for two months, I don't use her name accidentally when I refer to my daughter.

So I ran a couple of searches on Language Log and the archive to see if there was a term for this particular confusion and if there is a simple explanation, but I didn't find an answer.

I imagine that everyone has had this experience. Certainly, at least, it rings a bell with me.

A scanned image of a Singaporean identity card has been making the rounds online, recently turning up on the widely read techie blog Gizmodo. The card belongs to a young fellow, born May 13, 1990 in Singapore to Javanese parents, with the regrettable name of Batman bin Suparman. Two superheroes in one name? Well, one superhero and one Javanese name that's coincidentally similar to another superhero. Let's take a look.