Russian racehorses, Cooter Brown, fast foxes

[Arnold Zwicky]

thanks to dInIs for the bibliographic pointers.

now for some thread tying...

ordinary people invariably assume that proverbial expressions with
personal names in them originated as references to actual persons
bearing those names, and to salient characteristics of those persons.
so "drunk as cooter brown" *has to* allude to an actual sot named
cooter brown; then it's part of the business of historical linguists
to try to ferret out just who that cooter brown was.  (alternatively,
cooter brown could have been a character in a piece of popular fiction
- not an actual person, but as near as makes no difference.  the task
of the historical linguist remains just the same.)  this is just
ordinary narratophilia.

but this isn't necessarily the case.  folks don't just re-tell
stories; they also *invent* them on the spot.  plenty of people are
everyday fabulists, and are perfectly capable of creating a name that
somehow "sounds right" - the same way that writers and lyricists
create names (elizabeth bennet, eleanor rigby, etc.).  it's enough
that the name evoke some bit of cultural stuff, and then it can spread
from person to person.

ordinary people just *hate* to hear this idea.  there's an expression
"friend of dorothy" meaning 'homosexual person', there has to have
been a dorothy who was associated with homosexuals.  (alan berube
reports in Coming Out Under Fire that the fbi believed so deeply in
this idea that they spent some significant resources trying to track
down homosexuals by searching for the elusive dorothy.)  but there's
no reason to assume this at all, any more than there's reason to think
that generic vocatives like "joe" and "mac" had to originate as
references to specific men with these names.  all that had to happen
was for someone to pick "dorothy" as a name that sounded plausible as
the name of a [note use of subcultural technical term] fag hag and
then use it with acquaintances in a coded reference to homosexuality.

my inclination is to think that there's a lot more individual
creativity in language use than most folks credit, so i'm more than
a bit wary about starting a search for the real-life (or fictional)
dorothy or miss mamie johnson.

well, of course, you have to try.  but what happens when the leads
peter out?  the expression gets labeled "of unknown origin", and it
counts as a *failure* of etymology.  (non-linguists are regularly
peeved about how much we scholars just *don't know*, and they sure
don't like to be told that some things are probably in principle
unknowable.)

what's to be done?  well, it would help to have some studies where
a nonce creation is actually traced spreading through a small speech
community and into wider use.  yes, i know, hard to do.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)