Why: The two most sure ways to have the media use all three of your names are to be either a female judge/elected government attorney or a male political assassin or mass killer?
Sarah Evans Barker, Virginia Dill McCarty, meet John Wayne Gacy and Lee Harvey Oswald.
Weird.
I guess you could add Hillary Rodham Clinton to that list as well.
ReplyDeleteMakes 'em sound more ominous that way.
ReplyDeleteThough not for Bonnie, Clyde and John Dillinger, maybe because they had a form of Depression-era envy / cult status.
Or is it because they were all ambushed by the law?
With the women, I suppose it could be a desire-to-include-the-maiden-name thing, presuming they're married.
ReplyDeleteWith the killers, well, the one way I knew I was in REAL trouble as a kid was when my parents used all three of my names to call me...
John Peddie: People were poorer in the Depression. They could only afford one or two names.
ReplyDelete+100 or JR! :-)
ReplyDeleteSo.... where do Richard Milhous Nixon and Barack Hussein Obama fit in?
ReplyDeleteI always thought the reason that heinous criminals are identified by all three names was to prevent lawsuits. If the headline was "John Turner arrested for child molesting" then every John Turner would have a case for slander. If the headline is "John Kenneth Turner of South Bend arrested..." only men named John Kenneth Turner who live in South Bend and weren't arrested have a case.
ReplyDeleteAl_in_Ottawa
Les: Well, both of 'em were or are at the top of the CIA's chain of command, and at least one of them is on record endorsing the unlawful killing of U.S. citizens.
ReplyDeleteJohn Richardson: Politician/attorney, would-be mass murderer/ assassin; cut her hair short and she could make a case for belonging to both categories. (And deserving six names -- Hils, is it okay if the other three are curse words?)
John Peddie: Neither was a *mass* murderer, nor were they political assassins. I rest my case.
ReplyDeleteI like to remind Shermlock Jr. (who has the middle name of 'Wayne') that he shares that name with a long list of murderers.
ReplyDeleteOMG, Shermlock. O M G.
ReplyDeleteYou could be a hottie too...Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt come to mind.
ReplyDeleteI don't know who Sarah Evans Barker and Virginia Dill McCarty are,but here in WA we have Cathy McMorris Rogers and Jaime Herrera Buetler, who are both Republican congresscritters.
ReplyDeleteI just ass-you-me'd that that's the format the woman in question uses, for whatever reason.
It's sort of a packaging thing, like the 8" x 11" package to hold a single thumb drive. Bigger headlines.
ReplyDeleteThe next step up is to only have one name.
If you go to no-name then you sort of drop out of sight, like Prince.
I'm sure glad I don't have Wayne in my name anywhere.
Wasn't this discussion in "Conspiracy Theory" with Mel Gibson? Serial killers are supposed to get two names and lone assassins get all three.
ReplyDeleteBut then there's John Wayne Gacy and Sirhan Sirhan, who for a while was Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.
And had Reagan died we'd all know what Hinkley's middle name is.