spelling a name

[Arnold Zwicky]

an addendum to the thread from a while back about the problems
of spelling names for people...

i was walking across campus on tuesday when a young man came up
alongside me.  he was talking on a cell phone in spanish, though i
couldn't quite catch what he was saying.  then as he got within easy
earshot, he switched to english.

"rinconada", he said, identifying a stanford residence hall (or
perhaps a palo alto street or park), and he spelled it slowly in
english.  and again.  and again.  then he tried to repair bits of it
for his interlocutor: "A D A, not A N A", that sort of thing.  he
worked on one part of the word after another.  made another try at
spelling the whole thing.

then he shifted into spanish.  "rinconada", he said, and he spelled it
slowly in spanish.  and again.  and again.  then he tried to repair
bits of it in spanish - once again, getting one part of it apparently
fixed, then having that slip away when he turned to a different piece.
the person he was talking to clearly had severe memory problems, but
the young man persisted, with endless patience, quite unflappably (i
certainly wasn't like that when i was 19.  hell, i'm not like that
now, and i've had nine years of practice dealing every day with
someone whose memory is disintegrating).

the young man tried the whole word again.  then, inspiration struck.
i judged it to be an 80% wonderful inspiration.  "rinconada", he
repeated in spanish, "como rinco'n y nada".

there was a digression while he tried to explain, in spanish, the
meanings of "rinco'n" and "nada" (without using these very same
words), but eventually these efforts, apparently, succeeded, and he
moved on.  this is where the problematic 20% erupted.

pause.  no, the caller explained in spanish, only one N.

longer pause, as the consequences of "rinconada"'s having *two* Ns in
it propagated.

the last thing i caught was, in english, "not 'rico'... 'rinco'".  i
imagine it went on with a denial that ringo starr had anything to do
with it, but i didn't get to hear that, since we'd parted ways.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), still in awe of someone who
  could do this without showing any stress at all in his voice