[Ads-l] RES: Bop as a girls name

[Jonathan Lighter]

Professor Cohen is entirely correct.

There is something about the word "bop" that many English speakers find
inherently ridiculous.  It usually means to strike someone (as on the head
or in the nose), and mostly appears in humorous contexts, as in cartoons.

Even in my university linguistics courses, the name of the great German
philologist Franz Bopp elicited laughter as soon as it was mentioned.

So "Bop," I believe, would be a poor choice as a forename for anybody in
the English-speaking world.

JL




On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 2:19 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: RES: Bop as a girls name
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > Poster:       Christopher Philippo <toff at MAC.COM>
> > Subject:      Re: Bop as a girls name
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------=
> --=3D
> > [on the 16th]
> >=20
> > The word bop is probably best known as a synonym for hit or punch, I
> woul=
> d
> > think.  It shows up in that sense in the song for children ...
>
> surely the word is also well known as a shortening (of "bebop", a
> shortenin=
> g attested from the 1940s)  with uses as a noun (bop music), verb (just
> bop=
> ping along), nonsense syllable (Be-Bop-A-Lula), and the stem in "bopper"
> (a=
> s in the Big Bopper).
>
> NOAD2 has both senses.
>
> arnold
>
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