[Ads-l] Reality Winner

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Jun 11 18:02:14 UTC 2017


When he was in the news, back in the middle '60's, I read somewhere 'nother
- NewsTIME? L.A. Times? - that, in the case of Byron De La Beckwith, _De
La_ was, in fact, his middle name and he was known as "De La" to family and
friends, who used the pronunciation, "DEElay."

Use of the letter, A, to  spell the name/sound of that letter, is not
exactly rare, Behind The Cotton Curtain. Ladell Garrett, a cousin of mine,
down home in Texas, pronounced his name as approx. "LAYdale."

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 12:56 PM, Jim Parish <jparish at siue.edu> wrote:

> On 6/11/2017 11:10 AM, Dave Wilton wrote:
>
>> Journalists frequently use a person's middle name, especially someone
>> charged with a crime, to distinguish them from potential others with the
>> same name. Lee Harvey Oswald, for example, rarely used his middle name. He
>> was just "Lee Oswald" to those who knew him. It was journalists who made
>> the middle name iconic. Ditto for James Earl Ray.
>>
>> In Reality Winner's case, however, I don't think potential confusion with
>> others is an issue, which may be why *more* journalists aren't using her
>> middle name.
>>
>
> I'd want quantitative data before accepting that first claim. I can think
> of many people, accused of crimes similar to Winner's, whose middle names
> have not been reported prominently: Aldrich Ames, Edward Snowden,
> Bradley/Chelsea Manning, etc.
>
> Jim Parish
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list