1162. This week, we look at why some names just "feel right" while others don't and how vowels like "ee" create associations with smallness and sweetness while back vowels like "ah" sound bigger and more serious. Then, we look at dependent clauses and when it's OK to start a sentence with "because."
1162. This week, we look at why some names just "feel right" while others don't and how vowels like "ee" create associations with smallness and sweetness while back vowels like "ah" sound bigger and more serious. Then, we look at dependent clauses and when it's OK to start a sentence with "because."
The baby names segment was written by Valerie Fridland.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today, we're going to talk about why some names capture a person's essence and how to write with dependent clauses.
This first piece is by Valerie Fridland, so when you hear me say "I," that's her.
by Valerie Fridland
When I was pregnant with my daughter, my husband and I decided to keep her name a secret until she was born. Why? Because every Tom, Dick, and Jane had an opinion about the names we were considering. But we also struggled to come up with one that both of us felt would serve her well. Sloane? Nice but maybe too serious-sounding. Madison? Too likely to become a nickname like Mads. Clarice? Nope, ruined by association with Hannibal Lector. For a while, it looked like she was going to remain nameless until she was a teen.
Our difficulty coming up with a baby’s name is far from unique. Many people have strong negative or positive associations with certain names. But why?
Turns out the question "What’s in a name?" has occupied thinkers for centuries, in addition to every prospective parent. In fact, the sense that some names just feel right, while others don’t quite fit, like calling a Great Dane "Fifi," can be traced all the way back to antiquity. In Plato’s Cratylus, for example, Socrates debated how to come up with the correct names for people and objects and whether they reflected the natural essence of the things they defined.
This hypothesizing that words, and especially the sounds in words, somehow carry some intrinsic, associated meaning was furthered by Charles Darwin as part of his theory of evolution. He proposed that the origin of human speech was the imitation of sounds heard in nature and from associations that developed with humans' early emotional cries in what's referred to as the "musical protolanguage model."
For instance, sounds of despair or pain (Ah! Aowwww!) became part of the words we use to express such emotions (for example, "Stop" contains "ah," and "ouch" contains "aow"). So, under this protolanguage hypothesis, such sound-meaning links aren't arbitrary but are tied to early exclamations of happiness, excitement, sadness, anger, or other emotions.
While Darwin’s protolanguage theory fizzled out at the time, in the 1920s, this topic, referred to as "sound iconicity" or "sound symbolism," was picked up with renewed interest by linguists and psychologists alike. Research based on such theories discovered a link between certain sounds and how people perceived the attributes of objects, like their size or shape (and, in another line of research, emotional states).
This relationship between sound and size and shape has been found both in terms of descriptive words experimenters had people make up and, to some degree, in the existing vocabulary of languages. This area of research has also explored whether there is a fixed meaning to individual sounds.
Beyond just being an interesting aspect of our speech capabilities, sound iconicity can also have useful benefits. For example, when sounds match aspects of the objects they describe, such as "oh" in names of larger items, people seem to remember those names better than when the names have non-iconic sounds.
Also, in creating names for "big-sized" products, people tend to prefer names with more back vowels like "ah" or "oh" (like Tonka trucks). Likewise, smaller objects get named words containing "ee" sounds — something we see echoed in words like "mini" and "bitty baby." This not only seems to make products more memorable but also seems to encourage people to buy more of them when the sound "fits" the object's size and shape.
— think of the “ee” sound in “teeny” or “sweet.” More negative associations often go with "larger" sounding vowels, like the “oh” in “gross.” So, the vowels we use in words might influence how they are construed — explaining perhaps the Australian tendency to add "ee" to things that are associated with fun, like "choccy" for chocolate and "barbie" for barbeque.
The bottom line? Whether you’re naming a first-born baby or a new product, there is much more than meets the ear behind the question of what’s in a name. If you are aiming to make them memorable, pay a bit more attention to which vowels capture their essence. Turns out, to quote a famous Johnny Cash song, a boy named "Sue" might have had a fighting chance on the playground after all, but calling him "Susie" might invite a bit more trouble.
References
Darwin, C. 1871. The descent of man and selection in relation to sex. John Murray.
Eckert, Penelope. 2010. Affect, Sound Symbolism, and Variation. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 15 : Iss. 2 , Article 9.
Köhler, W. 1929. Gestalt psychology. New York: H. Liveright.
Nuckolls, J. B. 1999. The case for sound symbolism. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 225–252.
Sapir, E. 1929. A study in phonetic symbolism. J. Exp. Psychol. 12, 225–239.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
by Mignon Fogarty
Phrases and clauses are both groups of words that work together in a sentence. The difference is that a clause has a subject and a verb. Often, a clause could be a sentence if it were all by itself, and when it could be, we call it a main clause or an independent clause.
A phrase, on the other hand, is missing something. Phrases work within sentences.
There are prepositional phrases, noun phrases, and so on. Phrases can play a lot of different roles in a sentence, but they work with main clauses. Somewhere, every sentence must have a main clause. Here’s an example of a prepositional phrase followed by a main clause.
On the show "KPop Demon Hunters," [prepositional phrase] the members of the band Huntr/x defeat demons with their singing voices. [main clause]
"On the show 'KPop Demon Hunters'" is the prepositional phrase. And "the members of the band Huntr/x defeat demons with their singing voices" is the main clause, and you can recognize it as such because it's a complete sentence on its own.
Subordinate clauses get their name from the fact that they always start with a subordinating conjunction such as "since," "because," "although," and "while."
“Subordinate clause” is the name you’re more likely to have learned in school, but the other name, “dependent clause,” may help you better understand what they do because adding that subordinating conjunction to the head of the clause makes it dependent on a main clause. A dependent clause without a main clause is a fragment. The dependent clause needs the main clause — it depends on the main clause — to make it a proper sentence. Fragments are generally frowned upon in formal business writing, but you do often see them in more informal nonfiction and in fiction, especially in dialog, because they create a conversational, punchy, informal tone.
Let's build a sentence with a dependent clause. First we need a main clause:
I know spring is right around the corner. [That's a main clause. It has a subject and verb, and it sounds like a complete sentence.]
Now let's add a dependent clause.
I know spring is right around the corner because the days are getting longer. [That's called a complex sentence because it has a main clause followed by a dependent clause.]
If we write the dependent clause by itself ("Because the days are getting longer") it's a sentence fragment.
Now, you may have been taught not to start a sentence with the word "because" (one of the subordinating conjunctions), but that is a fib used by beleaguered elementary school teachers to keep small children from writing sentence fragments (e.g., Before Bobby leaves! Unless Marta brings cookies!)
A subordinate clause can go at the beginning of a sentence or later in a sentence. The only difference is that if it goes at the beginning, you need a comma after the subordinate clause, and if it goes later, you don’t need a comma.
Here are some "KPop Demon Hunter" examples with the subordinate clause at the beginning of the sentence:
And here are some examples with the subordinate clause at the end of the sentence:
Notice there were no commas when the subordinate clause came after the main clause.
If it bothers you to start a sentence with "because" or other subordinating conjunctions (or if it bothers your boss), you can see that it’s easy to flip your sentence around and put the subordinating clause at the end — but you don’t have to. There’s no adult grammar rule against it.
On the other hand, you can think about how the way you order the parts influences the way people experience the information. As Roy Peter Clark told us, the end of your sentence will be the most powerful part. But people have also done studies showing that readers have an easier time understanding sentences when the main clause comes first. So if you're using the principles of writing with plain English, you usually want to put your dependent clauses at the end.
To sum up, dependent clauses make your sentences more interesting and complex. Just make sure they’re attached to a main clause, you put a comma after them if they come before the main clause, and that you've thought about the bigger picture implications for your readers of putting the dependent clauses at the beginning or end of your sentences.
Finally, I have a familect story from Eric.
"Hey Mignon, this is Eric and I’m calling from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I have a famillect story that is both brand new and advances in two stages.
So our granddaughter Riley turned two a bit before Halloween, which is a really big deal on our street and which she really loved. She kept wishing people a 'Happy Halloween,' but it always came out as 'Hoppoween,' so that of course became what the rest of us said. And that’s the first stage.
The second stage is that after all the Halloween decorations were packed away and the Christmas decorations went up, she would look at the lights and garlands and proclaim 'Hoppoween,' despite calling the Christmas tree by its actual name.
So it looks like 'Hoppoween' has now become our familect for any big holiday or gathering of friends. Anyway, thanks for all you do, and a great big 'Hoppoween' to you and yours for 2026."
Thanks, Eric! I hope St. Patrick's Day is another happy Hoppoween for you and your family.
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I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening.