![]() I’m sure the legendary triathlete Siri Lindley cursed a little the day she found out that there was going to be a chat assistant on everyone’s phone named Siri. I mean, if a chatbot is coming to steal my name, I wouldn’t be the first. ( Everyday basics/Unsplash) Why must we humanize the names of our chatbots? This gradually led to less formal name structures, which have over time become more common. (Another effect of this, which is not the case for Ernie, is that the push to make names work better in poetry would lead to names with fewer syllables, like Michael to Mike.) Ernest does not lend itself to an easy rhyme, but a name like Ernie, which ends on a long “e” sound, ends as many other words do. Other well-established nicknames which were arrived at as a result of the same sort of ludic process include Dick from Richard, and Peg from Margaret, though in these two cases other complications came into play.īy that logic, it’s easy to see how we got Ernie. Other hypocoristics of this type included Bob from Robert via Rob, Bill from William via Will, and Nell from Helen. They clearly resulted from a playful process which involved speakers in taking an abbreviated one-syllable hypocoristic name and replacing it with some rhyming syllable. Nicknames like Ted have been in use ever since the Middle Ages and it is intriguing to think about how these particular hypocoristics came into being. The linguist Peter Trudgill has noted that strongly formal names like Ernest likely evolved into their less formal forms, like Richard to Dick, or Edward to Ed to Eddie, to help support poetic rhyming schemes.Īs Trudgill wrote for The New European back in 2020:īut there is another interesting development which can occur in the case of names like Edward: Edwards very often get called, not Ed but Ted-or even Ned. These phrases have a tendency to evolve over time, much as the English language itself has. By not calling me Ernest, you’re showing a sign of appreciation towards me. Now you might be wondering: Why do people shorten this name from Ernie to Ernest? (Or, in Sheryl Crow parlance, why is it that when his name is William, is she sure it’s Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy?) That’s because of the concept of the hypocorism, a Greek-derived term that essentially means “pet name.” Yes, we not think of it as such, but Ernie is a pet name, a sign of affection in nomenclature. (As far as I know, I’m the only Ernie Smith that is a modern-day journalist, though I haven’t looked closely.) I know of at least three separate successful musicians named Ernie or Ernest Smith, numerous athletes, and at least two generations of Ernies that came before me. The Wikipedia disambiguation page for Ernie Smith lists seven separate Ernie Smiths, none of which are me, while the related disambiguation page for Ernest Smith has 13 entries. Glenroy “Ernie” Smith, a Jamaican reggae musician, is. Today’s Tedium looks at the roots of Ernie, and considers why Baidu might have found it a fitting name. Maybe writing something might offer a reasonable shield. Crap, I thought (though I didn’t say “crap,” instead uttering another four-letter word). I just learned that Baidu, the second-largest search engine in the world, is about to launch an AI chatbot, and it’s named Ernie. But it’s that unusual nature that leads it to be used in unusual ways-as you might have heard, one of the most famous Muppets on Sesame Street shares my first name-and it’s perhaps for that reason that I’m writing about it now. (Only the “i” pokes its head out, like an alphabetical periscope of sorts.) It’s a weird name, I fully admit, which makes it somewhat memorable. I inherited my name, a two-syllable dynamo that, in lower-case form, barely expands beyond the x-height of the fonts that display it. Today in Tedium: Unless you’re Elton John or Lady Gaga or Elliott Smith, you generally don’t get to choose your name.
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