ON THE FREQUENCY OF PROPER NAME IDIOMS

As an introductory note, the denominations 'GB' and 'US', wherever they appear in the frequency tables of this paper, signify larger groups than just British or American names:

not all idioms thus labelled contain proper names – whether of person or place – that are ‘vernacular’ or referring to Britain or the United States. There are, in other words, phrases that carry also names referring to or originating in countries, ethnic communities or languages other than the British or American. This aspect is neatly illustrated by idioms associated to biblical contexts, and those coined by the armed forces under foreign operations; these contexts are, indeed, the major two origins to such non-native ingredients among English proper name idioms.

The former (7/24 in all [Top Hundred vs. Five Hundred]) are exemplified by Adam’s ale, as poor as Job’s turkey, and to raise Cain; the latter (2/7 respectively) by jerrycan, the black hole of Calcutta, and to do a Dunkirk. Among the

material – both the final data and the original collection – this ‘foreign legion’ constitutes an approximate share of nine per cent. [The representatives among the Five Hundred are to found in Appendix 3.]

The tabulation of both the Top Hundred and the Five Hundred (original collected data used for statistical

comparisons) has resulted in the following general picture (the parenthetical figures following the Top Hundred data, again, refer to the respective statistical analysis on the Five Hundred, unless otherwise stated).

An overwhelming majority of 83 (85.4) per cent of all proper name idioms are those with person names; in other

words, only every sixth of these idioms refers to a location.

Among person names, an equally overriding share is held by male names, overshadowing women by four to one; to rephrase, men are overrepresented (and women underrepresented) by some 30 per cent, considering their actual share of the British population. Specifically British population, for 74 (80.1) per cent of all person name idioms, and even more of those with a place name, 83 (84.7) per cent are British in origin;

this is natural enough, in view of the share of British works among the source compilations (eight British works versus two American, reflecting the same proportion of four to one).

Nearly a half of the person names in these idioms are First Names, 43 per cent (46.7); the remainder is distributed unevenly between Last Names and Identity Names, 38 against 19 per cent. The LN and IN shares appear, however, much more even in the larger data, namely 25.7 vs. 27.7 per cent.

Irrespective of the latter percentages, Person Names are clearly dominated by First Names.

Among the Person Names, two out of every three (67.7 per cent) appear in Noun Phrases, which also constitute a

slightly lesser, but still impressive proportion of all proper name idioms, 54 per cent (57.8). The next most

represented phrase groups (Top Hundred vs. the 500) are VPs (17 vs. 11 per cent), PPs (11 vs. 1 per cent), Ss (7 vs. 14 per cent), and APs (3 vs. 4 per cent), making Adverb Phrases the least frequent group: only each one hundredth idiom in this data contains an AvP. The respective shares among all idioms follow the quoted figures within two percentage units.

The results derived from Place Names are somewhat

conflicting, perhaps due to their modest representation among the Top Hundred (18 entries). There their largest share falls on VPs (61 per cent) and the NPs make up only 22 per cent, the rest being shared by AvPs at 11 per cent, and Ss at 6 per cent. A comparison with the larger data corrects the internal proportions within Place Names into the following order and shares: NPs (38 per cent), VPs (30), Ss (18), AvPs (8), PPs (4), and APs (2). The latter distribution is likely to be closer to the true frequencies.

In summary, the evidence gathered from the frequencies of the six phrase types among the three classes of male and female (and, to a lesser degree, place) names might be summed up as follows. The typical representative of an English idiom with a proper name constituent is a male First Name appearing in a Noun Phrase premodified by an adjective with an

unpleasant or bland ring to it (smart Aleck) or its Identity Name counterpart with no qualifying element (Paul Pry).

At the other end of the scale, equally typically, stands an untitled female Identity Name postmodified by a Noun

Phrase, the complete structure forming a favourably sounding Adverb or Preposition Phrase. Or, in fact, such a female does not stand there, since her occurrence in such a proper name idiom is against all likelihood (*like Anne Lovable of the Weather Service). The same is true of an Identity Name in a Preposition Phrase; with or without pre- or postmodification, such a structure simply does not materialize in an English proper name idiom (*according to honourable Jack Jones). The rest of the Person Name idioms fall in between these two extremes.

As for the Place Names, the typical occurrence may be exemplified by a Noun Phrase with its Place Name serving as a premodifier (Philadelphia lawyer), or Verb Phrase containing an unmodified Place Name (to send a person to Coventry), and both phrases, again, carrying unsavoury overtones. The

anterior formation, Place Names in Noun Phrases, being such an abundant denomination, it is somewhat peculiar that no modifying element of any kind is allowed in Verb Phrases containing related nominal constituents; *to miss the white cliffs of Dover is a perfectly acceptable phrase in English, but, on the evidence of this investigation, there is no

proper name idiom in English having such a structure. Why

this should be so would provide an absorbing challenge for anyone seriously interested in the English idiom; yet that remains a challenge to be met in some other thesis.