Aureoles/areolae eggcorn?

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 24, 2006, at 4:40 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> By the way, arnold, are you related to _Fr*tz Zw*ck*_, the astronomer
> who postulated the existence of, and named, so-called "dark matter" in
> 1933?

i have asterisked the name in the hope of throwing the astronomer's
daughter B*rb*rin* (* = a) off the track.  i would prefer not to get
any more raving e-mail from her in which she accuses me of blackening
her father's name by (falsely) asserting some relationship to him,
and inventing a story that my grandfather visited her father in
pasadena in the 50s, an event she maintains she *knows* never
happened.  (she is pathologically protective of her father's memory,
and continues to pick at the family's deep grievance that her father
never won a nobel prize.)

her father and my grandfather were born in the same small alpen
village in switzerland, which is the site of the Zw*ck*haus, and so
far everyone *in the world* with our last name who's done the
genealogy has gotten back to that village, and to a connection to the
rest of us (sometimes going back several hundred years).  i'd been
intending to write B*rb*rin* to clarify our relationship, but that's
clearly out of the question now.

the wikipedia article used to be fairly entertaining, because it
included a rant by her, but i see that it's been made more
professionally biographical.

check out "The Dark Matter Rap" by David Weinberg.

and my LLog piece on the Slut-o-Meter (yes, it's relevant):

    http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002884.html

arnold

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