Reversed née
In the
New York Times today
(6/10/06), Maureen Dowd's op-ed piece "Bloggers Double Down" refers to
a political blogger turned novelist by both of her names:
But others... see him [Markos
Moulitsas, who runs the political blog Daily Kos] the way Ana Marie
Cox, née Wonkette, described him his week in Time.com:...
Whoa! That "née" is reversed; the person who's blogged
under the name Wonkette was born Ana Marie Cox.
Maureen Dowd is not the first to get it backwards for
Cox/Wonkette. Here's the title of
a
book review by Phil Kloer in the
San
Diego Union-Tribune of 1/29/06:
"Ana Marie Cox, nee Wonkette, does
surprisingly well in her debut novel"
(Here "nee" is one degree less Frenchy than Dowd's "née".)
It's not just Wonkette. Here's a reversal (also accentless) for
Cutler/Washingtonienne, from "The Week in Wonkette" by Ryan Avent on
the
blog dcist on 1/4/06:
It began in this month's Capitol File,
where Jessica Cutler (nee Washingtonienne, and also a published author)
seems to direct a column (on sex, natch) at Cox.
It's not just women. Here are two reversals (accentless, but
still feminine in form if understood as French) for John Hinderaker, a
lawyer who blogs on Power Line and uses the alias Hindrocket, from
"Support The Troops, When Convenient" by "Reverend Mykeru" (Michael
Cortese)
on
the blog mykeru.com on 4/15/05:
Just the other day, a member of the
chickenhawk right, John Hinderaker (nee "Hindrocket", AKA "Assrocket")
committed one of the most egregious examples of abandoning the troops
when they start becoming real people...
and from "Hindrocket's Hackery" by Nico Pitney on
the blog Think Progress
of 4/14/05:
Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker (nee
"Hindrocket") is outraged.
It's fairly easy to see how things got turned around this way. We
start with the adoption of the French feminine singular participle
née 'born' to indicate a
married woman's maiden name, as in "Hillary Clinton née Rodham";
the OED Online revision of 9/03 has cites from 1758 through 2000, all
except one (from 1878) with the accent -- and that one indicates the
Frenchness of the word by italicizing it.
Next, it gets extended ("often humorously and for effect", the OED
says) to the meaning 'originally called' and is applied to things and
places, as in the OED's first cite in this sense, from a 1958 issue of
the
International Journal of
American Linguistics:
On Tagmemes, née gramemes
and, usually without an accent, to men who have adopted pseudonyms or
aliases, as in the OED's 1988 cite from the
Los Angeles Times:
He once had a coach, the infamous
Johnny Blood (nee McNally)
(though the gender-appropriate French
né
is also attested for the latter purpose; the OED has cites from 1937
on).
Then, it gets further extended to the meaning 'formerly called', with
no claim that the earlier name was the original one. Examples
that are unambiguously of this sort are not hard to find; they involve
a series of renamings, as in
this posting by
Doug Snow on the blog The Volokh Conspiracy, 4/4/06:
I think it's interesting that my IP
address is resolving from the Milwaukee Central Office of AT&T (nee
SBC, nee Ameritech, nee Wisconsin Bell).
or in
this one by
"Ace" on the blog Ace of Spades HQ, 8/17/05, entitled:
"P Diddy, nee Puff Daddy, Changing His Name Again"
This time the man was simplifying his name to Diddy. But he was
ORIGINALLY
Sean Combs, and at this point in his life was merely
FORMERLY
Puff Daddy, soon to also be formerly P Diddy. (Also note
Frenchness conveyed by italics.)
Once we get to things like "
nee
Puff Daddy", the way is open for the reader to (mis)understand the
nee as merely supplying an
alternative, not necessarily former, name -- to understand it as a
synonym of
a.k.a. or
AKA (or however you want to spell
it), with which it sometimes co-occurs, as in the Mykeru quote above,
or in
this
wonderful quote from "The Hysteries of Tacitus", by "Retardo
Montalban" on the blog Sadly, No!, of 5/11/06, which has pretty much
everything going on at once (with some invective thrown in for free):
Josh Trevino (nee' Tacitus, a.k.a. The
Marble Douchebag), in the conclusion to one of his patented 'I'll
Concentrate On The Mote In Your Eye If You'll Please Ignore The Huge
Pole Up My Ass' diatribes...
Here we get a version of
née
used of a man, to introduce a pseudonym, in combination with
a.k.a., and with a spelling that
marks it as French -- though ineptly, since the accent is associated
with the second
e rather than
the first.
In any case, such examples are not literally of reversed
née; instead they illustrate
the extension of the word to mean 'also known as', with no
specification as to the temporal order in which the names
appeared. I'm not ready to go there yet with Maureen Dowd, but at
least I see how she (and the others) got there. Are they the wave
of the future?
[Update, later the same day: A pile of readers -- Gene Buckley got in first -- rose up to suggest that Dowd's usage, and some (but possibly not all) of the others I cited, could be just a variety of the 'originally named' reading -- but extended from the view of the person referred to to the view of the reading public, or Us, and in this case We are the blogosphere. Or, in other words, that the meaning is no longer 'originally/first named', but 'originally/first known as'. We first came across her as Wonkette, then eventually discovered that she was Ana Marie Cox, so
FOR US Wonkette came first. Plausible as another route to the appearance of reversal, and also fairly distant from the original meaning of
née.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at June 10, 2006 01:05 PM