Are names having secondary meaning/connotations a recent phenomenon?

by verytamenow

In the wake of the internet and social media, certain names have gained commonly accepted implications and second meanings. Such as Karen having a I-Want-To-Speak-To-The-Manager entitled connotation along with racist implications or Chad now implying a misogynistic frat-boy/fuckboy attitude.

Has this had historical equivalents (excluding the major single cause scenarios like Adolf becoming a far less ideal name in the wake of WWII) and it's just something people do? Or is this a truly modern trend?

gerardmenfin

No, this not a new phenomenon. This has even got a name (sort of): deonomastics, when a person name acquires a second meaning and is turned into a common name (often pejorative, but not always). Here's an amusing example:

In 1873, celebrated writer and playwright Alexandre Dumas fils was looking for a proper name for the hero of his next play. This name, he later said, was "meant to evoke a moral degradation of some kind, with a vague whiff of the feminine about it." He first thought of Jules, but there were a number of famous people with that name and that could mean trouble. Next on the list were Adolphe, Auguste, Eugène, Alfred, Théodore, Arthur, and Anatole. Those names "smelled of smoky bars, of balls given on the Paris fortifications, of shops backrooms, of houses in dark backstreets with padlocked shutters." Then Dumas thought of Alphonse: "When Alphonse presented himself, he immediately appeared to me as the most worthy of the dishonour I was planning" (Dumas, 1885 cited by Balnat, 2018). Dumas named his play Monsieur Alphonse, after its main character, a truly despicable man who lives off the women he seduces (Massiac, 1894).

At about the same time, poet Hippolyte Lacombe wrote a funny song titled Alphonse of the Gros-Caillou, that tells the story of a family of brothel owners, all named Alphonse, men and women. Which Alphonse came first is unclear: when Lacombe was tried for obscenity in 1888^(1), his lawyer claimed that "Alphonse was in the air" and that his client had been inspired by Dumas (Débonnaire, 1888). Indeed, the use of Alphonse as a synonym for pimp was recorded as early as 1860 in the novel Petits mystères du Quartier Latin (Robert, 1860), but this may been a local thing and not well known. In any case, both Dumas' play and the Lacombe's song were enormously successful. Dumas' Alphonse was not a pimp, but Lacombe's Alphonse was, and from 1874 onwards the name became a common slang for pimp (see Virmaître's slang dictionnary of 1894). For instance, The Pretty Women of Paris, an English-language guide of Parisian prostitutes of 1883, uses as a joke name for its publisher "Alphonse and Co., 69 Rue des Dechargeurs."^2 In the last decades of the century, newspaper articles about (non-famous) people named Alphonse often made jokes about this new meaning.

Authors who wrote about this phenomenon noted that, in the first half the nineteenth century, the name Arthur had suffered from a similar fate, and was used to designate vain dandies who spent their lives courting women (Alexandre Dumas père and Théophile Gautier used it with this meaning in their works) (Véran, 1929). However, Arthur had somehow survived and its pejorative meaning was forgotten by the end of the century. Alphonse seems to have seen a revival in the first decades of the 20th century, perhaps due to King Alfonso XIII of Spain. By then, it no longer meant "pimp". In 1935 Maurice Chevalier sang Prosper (Yop La Boum), a song about a pimp named Prosper, which, again, seems to have killed the name for a while, until it was revived in the 1980s by a kid-targeted TV ad about pain d'épice.^3

Other names have been through the deonomastic grinder over the centuries: Gille(s) (stupid, from Gilles Le Niais, a comedy actor of the 17th century), Nicodème (stupid, since the 1660s), Pierrot (naive and stupid, since the 1860s), Marie-Chantal (a snobbish woman invented by Jacques Chazot in the 1950s, still unusable today and the closest thing to a Karen), Charlot (someone incompetent, from the French name of Charlie Chaplin and later of comedy group popular in the 1970s), etc. (Balnat, 2018).

Notes

  1. Lacombe was fined 5 francs and released.
  2. The street does exist, but décharger also means "to cum".
  3. Prosper was now a cartoon bear (with a choir of female bear cubs) and the lines about the pimp being the "king of the sidewalks" were replaced by "being crazy about pain d'épice".

Sources