new names

[JOSEPH E. LAFERRIERE]

I receive the daily digest rather than individual postings.
Let me here respond to several comments from different
people yesterday.

> damned
>  if I'm going to turn the support down
>on some half-baked principle.

I consider my principles fully baked and not half-baked.
You have your principles and I have mine. I fully understand
your feeling that the need for increased funding overrides
other considerations. I fully support the goal of
helping provide funding for worthwhile causes such
as environmental preservation. I am merely saying that selling
names like that should be viewed as a distasteful necessity
at best.

> I won't think him a crackpot for naming a plant after a television
>  character. However I might think him one, for thinking the television
>  character may be an actual person who will be born in several centuries.

I have two responses to that 1) How do know Keiko O'Brain
will not be born in the future and really travel to the
planet Bajor?  I have long maintained that Star Trek was
created by splicing together excerpts from video surveillance
tapes that Geordi LaForge sent back to the 20th Century
via a distortion in the space-time continuum. How do you
know I'm wrong? 2) Sheesh. Maybe I should start putting
smily-faces in my notes to show when I am joking.   :-)

>  Billieturnera ... is a four-syllable name and avoid-worthy
>  >on that count alone.

>  Maybe it's just an accent thing - I reckon it's 5 syllables.

You are correct. Mea culpa. But this brings up another point:
An anglophone might consider Billieturnera easily
pronounceable, but how about a foreigner? I have seen non-Americanss
stumble over names like that more than once. Even non-anglophones
who have studied English in school have trouble pronouncing
things like that. In Mexico, the "ll" in the above name is
likely to be pronounced as a "y" and "ie" in the middle of
the word may well be pronounced as two syllables.

Q'plaH!
First-of-four

--
Dr. Joseph E. Laferriere
"Computito ergo sum ...  I link therefore I am."