Speaking of names in fiction, we were watching Slow Horses recently (I read the book awhile ago), and I got to thinking about the excellent names he chose for the characters: Jackson Lamb, River Cartwright, Diana Taverner, Charles Partner . . . each name is just a little bit more than it needs to be, in a way that gives the book a sense of heightened reality.
I think that using this kind of bold character name (again, Philip K. Dick is the master here, also Vladimir Nabokov) is a welcome sign of confidence in a writer.
P.S. Also this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dickensian_characters
Charles Dickens had some as well.
I am not familiar with the book or TV series, but I kind of tried to get what you might be trying to make clear with the names. English is not my native language, so I may not be the best person to comment on the names and what they might (implicitly) convey.
Anyway, I looked up some more information about the TV series, and I like playing with words, and I think it’s fun to try and make something clear by some creativity or in an unusual way. What follows is a combination and/or the result of these three things:
I wonder if there is some alternate universe where professor Werdan Legnam has written a blog post about bold fictional names as a sign of confidence by referring to a TV series in which actors Jackson Lamb, River Cartwright, Diana Taverner, and Charles Partner play characters named Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, and James Faulkner.
Yeah, one of the things you realize when you look into it is that lots of real names are also “just a bit more than it needs to be.” There are plenty of boring real-world names like “Phillip Price” and “Andrew Gelman” and “Anonymous”, but also interesting ones like “Vladimir Nabokov.”
I made a similar point fairly recently in the comments on this post: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/01/names-in-fiction-perkus-tooth-morrison-roog-ragle-gumm-addison-doug-bodie-kane-and-thalia-keith/#comments
Quote from above: “Yeah, one of the things you realize when you look into it is that lots of real names are also “just a bit more than it needs to be.””
Thank you for your comment! That was pretty much what I was wondering and/or trying to point out. I don’t think I read your comment at the time, so I think we’ve tried to make a similar point independently. Regardless, I sometimes wonder whether doing this in my perhaps unusual manner may cause the point I am trying to make to get lost, so your comment is reassuring to me.
Side note: in the comment I’ve tried to rearrange the letters of the name Andrew Gelman to make another name of the professor in the alternate universe and came up with Werdan Legnam which I thought sounds like a real name. I had fun doing this all, I like playing with words and sentences and such things for brief moments in time. This blog and the comments are regularly a source of material for these little puzzles and attempts, and they have even resulted in ideas for, and parts of, manuscripts I’ve written.
Phil:
I recommend you read Stephen Vincent Benet’s poem, American Names. It’s good!
I checked out the poem, and was focusing on the rhyming format. I noticed the last section (is it called a “verse” in poetry?) had 6 lines and a different rhyming format. Sometimes I think this might work, but in this case I thought the content of the last “verse” was not clearly different from what came before, so the differences concerning the number of lines and rhyming stuff didn’t work out for my brain.
As another example of how this blog and the comments here regularly provide material for puzzles and things to ponder, may I propose the following final “verse” to “solve” this all:
“I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmédy.
I shall not be there, for my heart is at Wounded Knee.”
Is “Vladimir Nabokov” interesting in Russian?
Sorry for being pedantic but you use the term awhile in many of your posts but you keep using it incorrectly https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/awhile-usage
Stilton Cheesewright anyone? (the inimitable Wodehouse of course)
Yes, I read through all the comment on this and previous entries and wondered why no one mentioned Wodehouse.
Galahad Threepwood, Pongo Twistleton, Montague Bodkin, Rupert Psmith, Angus McCallister, etc.
He also included titles and nicknames to good effect: Lady Constance Keeble, Lady Hermione Wedge, Maj. Gen. Sir Miles Fish, Admiral George J. “Fruity” Biffen, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, Bart., etc
Dogen:
I like Wodehouse too, but I don’t think his names count because they’re just straight-up jokes, which is something different than what I was talking about. I’d say the same about the names in Catch-22.
But, as Phil said, there are real-life names that are just as extreme, such as the English journalist and homophobe named Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. The name itself is out of Wodehouse, but the homophobia takes it to the next level.
Yeah I’m not so sure about that distinction.
I mean clearly some of Wodehouse’s names (especially the nicknames) are obviously straight-up jokes but I think most are actually reasonably close to real while still being amusing (am I missing the joke in Lady Constance Keeble, eg?)
And same with the Slow Horses folks. I’ve only seen the TV shows but you can’t tell me it’s not deliberately hilarious. Yes it’s got lots of thrills and spills and nice characters dying and all, but (for one example) Roddy Ho???
River Cartwright himself is comic in the tradition of the Avengers’ John Steed.
I’m currently reading the Crying of Lot 49 and think Thomas Pynchon deserves a shoutout here as well.