Help on an urbanish legend?

[tahnan]

I bought a book of Double Crostics from a going-out-of-business Buck-a-Book today, so I paid something like seventy-five cents for it, and I figured, sure, why not? So one of the quotes in it is from Richard Lederer's Crazy English:

Sound and meaning...work upon us in ways that ear and mind alone cannot always analyze. Consider the foreign couple who decided to name their first daughter with the most beautiful English word they had ever heard. They named the child "Diarrhea."

For a while now I've disliked Richard Lederer; I find him to be full of recycled jokes, bland observations, and awe for the most mundane aspects of English (while ignoring the truly awesome parts). For instance, I think the "why do we drive on a parkway but park on a driveway" observation is his--though perhaps he stole it from George Carlin, perhaps Carlin stole it from him, perhaps Carlin never said it. I frankly find the answer a much more interesting fact about English than the random "ahaha" observation.

The quote above, though, reminds me of some of the things the folks at LanguageLog often point out about other language myths, such as a certain amount of superiority at the expense of foreigners (compare how quaint those Esquimo must be for their nine billion names of snow).

Some vague Googling turned up any number of people claiming that they'd heard of someone with the name, in classic "no this really happened to a friend of a friend" urban legend fashion. And thus I ask: does anyone out there, librarian or amateur researcher or language maven or idle reader, have any evidence at all that the anecdote related by Lederer is true?

Comments

[cnoocy]

Snopes is doubtful of the entire class of legends. Which doesn't absolutely disprove this particular item.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I can't help you, but, some random pop culture trivia I thought I'd share: Beavis and Butthead used to call their classmate Daria (pre-spinoff) "Diarrhea".

So why does "park" have those two meanings, anyway? Did people used to park their carriages in the park? Why did someone come up with "parking lot" instead of just using "car park"?

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

The sense of "park" as a place to put cars came from French; I gather that, in fact, the military would set up an enclosed space--i.e., a "park"--and put their vehicles, artillery, and so forth there. The verb derived thence.

Feh Mal eee

[(Anonymous)]

No but my mother related a story about one of her 'cases' once -- the child was named Female. Pronounced Feh Mal Ee... the parents said they thought the hospital already named her.

Certainly possible that a similar situation happened with one of the arm tags denoting a bowel problem.

[flynngrrl.livejournal.com]

No, although a friend of mine once went to school with a girl named Suppaporn Pornpromlickit.

I may be spelling it incorrectly, but you heard it right. Supa-porn. Porn. Prom. Lick it.

It probably means pretty girl girl with nice hair or something in its original language.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

No 'c', I think. There was an MIT student named Sataporn Pornpromlikit. Ah, Thai names. But it is of course another matter entirely.

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Today's winner (from a real estate closing a friend was doing paperwork for this morning): Don Juwon . A different category (as it's misappropriation of a literary reference, not an everyday word), but still a source of amusement.

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

To clarify, since I forgot my brackets would be eaten...that's a first name and middle name. Don Juwon Somerandomlastname.

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

I know a girl in Sacramento named Inertia (nickname: 'Nert). The mom just liked the sound of the word. She also has a son named Satori Tsunami.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Interesting! Though that's somewhat different, because Californians are fundamentally insane the mother presumably knew what the words meant and named her children that anyway. That takes away the condescending-toward-foreigners aspect of the story--but it also weakens Lederer's point a little, insofar as it no longer illustrates that someone might use a word as a name without even knowing what it means.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine that Lederer's story is true. Listen to a movie in Japanese, without subtitles, sometime, and try to answer the question "what's the prettiest word you hear in the movie?" If you don't know the langauge, you can't even segment the sounds you hear into words. The words you hear, you can't pronounce correctly. And even if you could, there's no way you'd figure out how to spell "diarrhea"; hardly anyone can spell that correctly. If they asked an English-speaker how to spell it, wouldn't the speller also be friendly enough to say "by the way, here's what that means..."?

The notion that you'd pull a few syllables out of the stream of uncomprehended speech, and pronounce them well enough to be recognized, and that it would happen to be a word, seems wildly unlikely. The fact that it would end up being a word that's embarrassing to name a child is unlikelier still. There are plenty of other things I've seen Lederer publish that are obviously made up. He clearly thinks the important thing is whether the story is amusing, not whether it's true.

Still, as fake linguists go, he's not nearly as annoying as Safire.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

You know, I waver on whether Safire's more or less annoying than he is. Safire's pretty darned prescriptive, of course, but I feel that that's more explicit in his writing. And a lot of what I've seen from him more recently is etymological: both finding origins of old words and phrases and tracking neologisms.

Can you think offhand what "obviously made up" things Lederer has published? It'd be handy to have a few such data points for when his name comes up.