Brenton Dickieson posted the other day about a comic-book adaptation of The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. I haven’t read that book in decades, but I did remember the wonderful names of demons. We’re in a digital world now, so I pulled out every such name from the text. The algorithm is nothing special: any word that begins with a capital letter and flunks spell-check is a candidate; delete a few dozen stragglers by hand.
Results: Scabtree, Screwtape, Slubgob, Slumtrimpet, Toadpipe, Wormwood.
What do we see here? They all come from the latter third of the alphabet. Lots of “s” words. (The Screwtape Letters is dedicated to Tolkien, who thought “s” was a sound for bad guys, too. Saruman, Sauron, Shelob, Sackville…). They’re mostly made from jamming two short English words together.
There’s another author who did that, at a much less elevated level. Keith Laumer wrote a ton of science-fiction stories about Jame Retief, a muscular, norm-busting diplomat in the “Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne” a gender-busting arm of Earth’s hegemony over the galaxy. Wikipedia says they’re satirical, but I’d describe them more like broad, sophomoric humor. 21st-Century intellects will find them a bit crass. (Naturally, I love them.) Laumer was a diplomat himself before he became a writer. These stories seem to be settling scores with his old bosses. The bosses in these stories get names like:
Barnshingle, Clawhammer, Clayfoot, Crodfoller, Dimplick, Grossblunder, Hidebinder, Hipstinker, Lackluster, Longspoon, Nitworth, Otherday, Passwyn, Pennyfool, Proudfoot, Rumpwhistle, Shortfall, Sidesaddle, Sitzfleisch, Spradley, Sternwheeler, Straphanger, Thrashwelt, Thunderstroke, Underthrust, Whaffle, Wrothwax
Of course, my favorite of these come from proverbs: he who sups with the devil must use a long spoon”; “he who runs away lives to fight another day”. We see the same pattern — fully a quarter of the names begin with “S”. Almost half come from the last third of the alphabet. If we remove the names that explicitly come from such proverbs, the pattern gets more pronounced.
What is it that makes funny names bend that way alphabetically?
