Outside his name

George Thompson george.thompson at NYU.EDU
Thu Dec 6 04:02:38 UTC 2007


The fact that the earliest years of Sesame Street have lately been given a PG rating has perhaps had me thinking in that vein, but --

Fairly early on, Sesame Street had a hip-talking black puppet whose name was Roosevelt Franklin.  A catch-phrase associated with him was "who's calling me outside my name".  My daughter may remember what lead up to this -- my opportunity to follow Sesame Street was limited.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
Date: Wednesday, December 5, 2007 6:41 pm
Subject: Outside his name
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU


> I'm surprised Larry didn't already post this, but there you are. This
> morning (12/5/07) on Mike and Mike in the Morning (ESPN radio), they had
> a segment with a new football analyst, a recently retired paper. One of
> the topics of discussion was the incident late in the Monday night
> Patriots-Ravens game, in which Ravens players allege that an on-field
> official repeatedly addressed one of them as "boy". (Both player and
> official are African-American.) The new analyst, Marcellus Wiley, an LA
> native who played at Columbia University prior to his 10-year NFL career
> (as this was his first appearance, he started by discussing his CV), is
> also African-American. In discussing the "boy" incident, he repeatedly
> used the expression "outside his name", which, from context meant "not
> by his name; by something other than his name". An example would be "if
> the official indeed called Rolle outside his name..."
> --
> ========================================================================
> Alice Faber                                       faber at haskins.yale.edu
> Haskins Laboratories                            tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
> New Haven, CT 06511 USA                               fax (203) 865-8963
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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