Showing posts with label names. Show all posts
Showing posts with label names. Show all posts

Friday, 2 July 2010

In which I arrange a marriage

A stirrup, yesterday.

Today the firewall goes up on the Times, and I am celebrating the day on my STILL FREE blog by launching yet another of my doomed attempts to blog more often than once a week and about more than Doctor Who and Strictly Come Dancing. We shall see.

Anyway, it seems apt to begin this doomed attempt - what do you mean, "self-fulfilling prophecy?" - by commenting on something I read in yesterday's Times, which I bought specifically for the Eureka magazine inside, and which did not actually come with a Eureka magazine inside, and if I want to read the Eureka magazine online I now have to pay to do so. Anyway. No point linking to the piece as it is NO LONGER FREE, but it was their write-up of the case about whether troops still have human rights in war zones. (Apparently they do not.)

I'm sure that I am not the first to mention the glorious name of the outgoing Chief of the Defense Staff, Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup. There are simply not enough people on this planet called things like Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup and I fear those that are left will soon die out. Unless - UNLESS - Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup were to marry the lawyer representing the complainant in this case, the admirably named Jocelyn Cockburn. Yes, people: *they were involved in the same case*. Their eyes will have met across a crowded courtroom, he on one side, she, literally and figuratively on the other, and yet joined by the force of nomenclature that no man can tear asunder...

Surely love must follow. And as we all know from our close study of the Bard, first comes love, then comes marriage, and then comes the baby in the baby carriage. Surely the world deserves nothing less than Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup-Cockburn and Lady Jocelyn Stirrup-Cockburn and their children The Honourable Jack and Alfred "Hitchcock" Stirrup-Cockburn.

You know, I think my dad might have been one of the judges on this case. I'm going to MAKE IT HAPPEN.

Hang on. Would Cockburn-Stirrup be better?

Wednesday, 21 April 2010

Fattypuffs and Thinnifers


This post from my big-mouthed friend reminded me of my theory of fat names and thin names, and my sub-theory of bearded and clean-shaven names, which I don't think I have ever elucidated here.

Basically, it's this. Some names are fat. Some names are thin. Some names suggest beards. Some names do not. So Brian Blessed correctly has a beard and is fat, but Geoff Hoon, who should be fat and bearded, is erroneously thin and clean shaven. I get away with being thin by virtue of my name Marie Phillips, but if I had married a boyfriend of long ago and become Marie Barraclough I'd be so fat you could roll me down a hill. Russell T Davies is fat. Steven Moffat, despite the word "Fat" in his name, is thin. David Tennant is thin. Matt Smith is fat. Karen Gillan is thin. Billie Piper is fat. And so on.

This makes perfect sense, right? Right?