ThorMay.net is passionate skeptic information blog
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thormay.net The Passionate Skeptic contents page
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Names are funny things. You can summon the devil with them, marry with them and get sent to war because you own one. Slaves in many a country, including old Chosun, were not allowed to inherit one. As a prisoner or bank customer you might be dehumanized by a mere number. We have nick-names and pen-names and nom-de-guerre, not to mention intimate bedroom names and lately, avatar names for Net chat flights of fancy. In short, a name is our social mask, sometimes chosen at whim, sometimes imposed on pain of death.
From that first stare of infant school disbelief my own name has had the caste of a trickster's magic cloak. No one called Thorold Pyrke May could possibly belong down in the mosh pit with the Johns and and Marys and Ians. Teachers would circle around it like a possibly contagious virus. What god-forsaken failed state could the owner of such a moniker hail from, and how had he wound up in the bacon-and-eggs-and-steamed-pudding-world of Australia (97% Anglo-Irish in 1945, when I was born) ? As a teenager, armed by a thousand slights, I would argue fiercely that Thorold (old English, 'the might of Thor') had come to England with the Viking invasions 1500 years ago ... But it was all too complicated. Thorold was a non-starter, didn't stack up for friendly familiarity along with Tom, Dick and Harry. But they couldn't quite squash the owner either; it didn't belong with all those greasy Southern European labels like Alfonso and Dimitrius which had begun to invade the pure Anglo heartlands of Sydney town. No, there was something elvish, something of a wizard flavour about Thorold that seemed faintly dangerous. Best to leave its owner alone .... Later, much later, lobbing a job as a traveling salesman on the mean city pavements, the price of exotica became too high. "Hi", I'd grovel, "I'm Tony from Business Equipment...". Escaping slick Tony was to breath oxygen again, to claw out of the fetid swamps of commerce into the high lands of intellectual splendour. Well, not too splendid. 'Thor' edged in as a compromise.
But even 'Thor', disguised in flattened monotone of Australian street talk, was a cultural missile way beyond the calibration of your average boozy bloke. Resignedly, I'd offer the handle : "G'day, I'm Thor", then wait for the ricochet. It was pretty predictable. "G'day Phil", they'd shoot back. "Yeah mate..". It was no good correcting them. More than once some bozo has turned aggressive and argued heatedly that I'd said "Phil". There was a puzzle here. Maybe it's why I became a linguist. Phonologically, /th/ is an affricate, /f/ ('ph') is a frictative, so they are pretty close. If you think about it, not many common English given names start with these sounds. When the average person hears something like /f/ or /th/ their mental computer does a rapid search amongst the small store of candidate words, and selects what it thinks is most likely. Then that becomes a biblical certainty in the individual's memory. Apparently their critical faculty doesn't extend to the entirely unrelated final sounds in Thor and Phil (/or/, /il/).
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