Monday, November 13, 2006

"You should see a podiatrist about those... amphibrachic feet!!!" Or: "N WAV was yesterday, dude!"

"Matt Bauman!" Several people I know (girls mostly, it seems) refer to me by both my first and last name. Is this because Matt is such a common name and they need to differentiate me from other Matts they may know? Is "Matt Bauman" an especially snappy phrase? To my mind it doesn't really roll off the tongue, but I've been hearing it for like 21 years, so maybe I'm biased.
When I was in 7th grade, my hero was Charlie Brown. I was awkward and unpopular, couldn't get the girl to save my life, but a book of Peanuts comic strips reassured me that somebody else out there felt my pain. I bring this up because he too, that loser of baseball games, misser of footballs, ruiner of Christmas plays, was referred to by both his Sur- and Christian name. Perhaps - as the title of my post suggests - it has to do with prosody. Both "Charlie Brown" and "Matt Bauman" constitute a trisyllabic foot. "Charlie Brown" is an anapest (short short long). "Matt Bauman" is an amphibrach (short long short) aka: the foot used in limericks. Is there something about the unstressed first syllable that makes people want to tack a couple more on there just in case? Something else interesting: contained within the aforementioned set, Girls Who Call Me "Matt Bauman" is the subset "Girls Who Don't Want to Date Me". It seems like the ladies with whom I have established a platonic relationship are most inclined to use my full name, though that hypothesis is based on the most casual of observations and may well be bunk. I will further investigate this phenomenon and hopefully come to a greater understanding of the Conditioning Effects of Meter in Nickname Selection.

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