slash

[Jim Parish]

Dan Goncharoff wrote:
> Didn't Charles Schulz already walk this path when he named one of his
> characters "5"?
>
> http://comics.com/peanuts/1963-09-30/
>
> The character's full name was 5 94572, his father having changed the
> family's surname to their (recently introduced a few months before)
> ZIP code.

SF writer Alfred Bester was using nonalphabetic characters in names even earlier; his
_The Demolished Man_ (1953) featured characters named Duffy Wyg& and Sam @kins.
(I thought there was one with a numeral in his/her name also, but a quick scan doesn't
find one.)

Jim Parish

> On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 3:49 PM, Garson O'Toole
> <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject:      Re: slash
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > On the topic of names containing characters that are not in the
> > alphabet, I recall seeing the byline "Jennifer 8. Lee" in the New York
> > Times. Here is a link to an archive of her articles and a Wikipedia
> > link.
> >
> > http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/jennifer_8_lee/index.html
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee
> >
> > Michael Quinion spotted the name back in 2008 and wrote about it to
> > the ADS list. There is additional discussion in the ADS archive.
> >
> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0804A&L=ADS-L&P=R13105
> >
> > Garson
> >
> > On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> >> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> >> Subject:      Re: slash
> >> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> On Sep 6, 2010, at 5:28 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
> >>
> >>>
> >>> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 8:07 AM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Not the same topic, really, but this is still about vocalized (or "oralized") punctuation marks:
> >>>>
> >>>> One of my students insists that she attended high school with a girl who spelled her name
> >>>> L--a and pronounced it "la dash ah" (the "dash" should appear as a solid line, probably).
> >>>>
> >>>> I shared the information about L--a with a friend who teaches in elementary school, and
> >>>> she reported a similarly named student in her school:  K--a.
> >>>
> >>> I posted these links to Laura Wattenberg's three-part blog post last
> >>> year, since "Ledasha" (+ variants) has come up here in the past:
> >>>
> >>> http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2009/10/ledasha-legends-and-race-part-one
> >>> http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2009/10/ledasha-legends-and-race-part-two
> >>> http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2009/10/ledasha-legends-and-race-part-three-of-three
> >>
> >> meanwhile, although the reports have been washing in for some time now, there's still no actual documentation.
> >>
> >> arnold
> >>
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> >>
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
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