Saturday, September 30, 2006

I went to college with an individual named Craig Plunges. He was an English major, interested especially in contemporary poetry, and quite tall.

I bring this individual to your attention because of the remarkble fact that his name is both a proper noun and a full sentence. What if your name were "Bobby Goes to the Store"? Or "It Rains"? In his natural state he's both grammatically correct and ambiguous -- either a name or a sentence; however, once you try to add him to a sentence, you have to decide which is which. Either, "Craig Plunges is coming over" (name) or "Craig plunges for a living" (sentence).

I once worked briefly with someone whose full name, though not spelled this way, was pronounced "On the Loo," but that's just a prepositional phrase and so not at all in the same league.

My own last name is an adverbial phrase, though I assume by accident. "Schön" in German means pretty or beautiful, and if you drop the umlaut in English, you're supposed to add an "e" -- schoen. But "schon" means "already," so my last name -- Schonberg -- now means "already mountain," which doesn't mean much, as far as I can tell. Not only am I far from sentencehood, but the pieces of name I do have can't even be cobbled into recognizable phrases, a sorry state of affairs. Perhaps if my middle name were "is"...

1 comment:

craigplunges said...

Dear Bunny,

This is the *actual* Craig Plunges. I'm in a doctoral program now at Harvard and, as we work towards putting out publications and attending conferences etc., in short become more 'public' figures, they suggest we google ourselves in order to know what people will find should they look us up. I have to say I was amused to find that this was the second link listed, after the Harvard Renaissance Colloquium (which I'm currently coordinating) and before a whole slew of articles with the amusing title, "Daniel Craig Plunges into Wastebasket for New Pal." Outstanding. I would love to know who you are for curiosity & old time's sake, so please send me a message via facebook. Best regards, Craig