Use of first names
Your friendly global villain
May 4th 2011, 18:15 by G.L. | NEW YORK
BREATHLESS American TV presenters, I notice, have been saying "Osama" rather than "Bin Laden" a little more often. The Newseum's daily cull of the world's front pages on May 2nd and May 3rd shows that while most used the surname, some "Osama is dead", "How Osama was killed" and "Usáma je mrtev" headlines are also scattered about.
What is it about very nasty people that makes us use their first names as though they were our buddies? And why some but not others? "Osama", "Saddam" and "Fidel" are common, yet no "Josef" or "Adolf". No "Muammar" either, not even after he started having citizens strafed from helicopters.
Some first names are used more for convenience than for condemnation. Diplomats and journalists sometimes talk in their convivial insider way of "Bashar" (al-Assad), but that's mainly to distinguish him from his father, the Lion of Syria, whose troops massacred perhaps 20,000 at one sitting but was never "Hafez". On the other hand, some first names may be too common to use. "Robert" won't substitute for "Mugabe", and there are too many Omars besides al-Bashir and Augustos other than Pinochet.
Other villains with short familiar names aren't necessarily following the Osama-Saddam-Fidel pattern. Napoleon was a royal name, like Elizabeth or Victoria; Mao, of course, a surname; and Pol Pot a nom de guerre. Nicaraguans refer to "Daniel", but that's only in Nicaragua, where everyone knows which Daniel they mean, and both Mr Ortega's supporters and his detractors use it in equal measure. (For that matter, this is true of Mr Castro too.)
For the not-so-villainous, people may use first names out of love (Winston), but more often, again, out of need. Hillary is Hillary mainly to distinguish her from the other Clinton whose shadow she can never quite escape, though there is a trace of male chauvinism in it too. Bibi and Condi are nicknames, as was Monty, so I feel they don't quite count. And Newt... well, how can anyone resist Newt?
* Offensive language: titles. By using first name titles where social distance is great, it demeans the subject and reduces the indimidation.
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/05/use_first_names
What is it about very nasty people that makes us use their first names as though they were our buddies? And why some but not others? "Osama", "Saddam" and "Fidel" are common, yet no "Josef" or "Adolf". No "Muammar" either, not even after he started having citizens strafed from helicopters.
First-name terms are obviously a way to diminish a feared enemy, especially in the triumph of his death or downfall. But merely being a bad hat isn't enough, it seems: he has to be extensively demonised before meriting the treatment, so maybe Libya's mad, bad colonel just hasn't been in anyone's sights for long enough. And if a man is too evil—on the massacre-of-millions scale—then such jolly familiarity apparently becomes bad taste. Stalin was Uncle Joe once, before the truth came out.
Some first names are used more for convenience than for condemnation. Diplomats and journalists sometimes talk in their convivial insider way of "Bashar" (al-Assad), but that's mainly to distinguish him from his father, the Lion of Syria, whose troops massacred perhaps 20,000 at one sitting but was never "Hafez". On the other hand, some first names may be too common to use. "Robert" won't substitute for "Mugabe", and there are too many Omars besides al-Bashir and Augustos other than Pinochet.
Other villains with short familiar names aren't necessarily following the Osama-Saddam-Fidel pattern. Napoleon was a royal name, like Elizabeth or Victoria; Mao, of course, a surname; and Pol Pot a nom de guerre. Nicaraguans refer to "Daniel", but that's only in Nicaragua, where everyone knows which Daniel they mean, and both Mr Ortega's supporters and his detractors use it in equal measure. (For that matter, this is true of Mr Castro too.)
For the not-so-villainous, people may use first names out of love (Winston), but more often, again, out of need. Hillary is Hillary mainly to distinguish her from the other Clinton whose shadow she can never quite escape, though there is a trace of male chauvinism in it too. Bibi and Condi are nicknames, as was Monty, so I feel they don't quite count. And Newt... well, how can anyone resist Newt?
* Offensive language: titles. By using first name titles where social distance is great, it demeans the subject and reduces the indimidation.
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/05/use_first_names
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