FN + LN

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
Thu Jun 7 01:45:09 UTC 2007


Well, there's Major Major, who eventually became Major Major Major, but when Heller refers to him, as he always does, as "Major Major," one can't tell whether it's FN + LN or R + LN.

  One imagines that O'Brien read _Catch-22_, but there's little identifiable influence of the earlier book on the later.

  JL



Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: FN + LN
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At 6:34 AM -0700 5/29/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>When I was a kid, the unalterably binomial _Charlie Brown_ struck me
>as weird. Now I'm used to it, but it's still peculiar.
>
> ISTR that Tim O'Brien, in his fictions _Going After Cacciato_ and
>_The Things They Carried_, sometimes uses binomial names as some
>sort of mannerism. Will check.
>
> JL
>

Do I remember correctly (if vaguely) that one of Heller's characters
in _Catch 22_ always referred to on a FN + LN basis? (Not to be
confused with LN-only Yossarian.) If so, this would be a
continuation of the tradition, given other links between Catch-22 and
O'Brien's novels.

LH

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