Vocabulary Stretch Follow-Up

An oddly large number of emails on my "Vocabulary Stretch" blog post.  Funny what gets people's attention.

Some samples:

Reader A:  Have you considered that 便覽 might be better ─ or at least more puzzlingly ─ translated as "enchiridion"?

Me:  Ah, Sir, you will not out-vocab me in this zone.  "...fourteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, psalters, triodions, mineias and meaneons, heirmologions and tetraevangelions, sticherarions, octoechoes in neumes..." (Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, pp. 62-3)

Reader B (referring to the Chinese furniture sold as "n****r brown"): Wouldn't it have warmed your heart if instead of telling us that:

The AP story said the consumer is seeking compensation and has filed a report with the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

it had said:

The AP story said the consumer accepted the company's apology and laughed off the incident.

Me:  What, Sir, would you deny the lady her Rosa Parks moment?  For shame! How shall we ever make progress towards racial harmony with mean-spirited attitudes like yours?

Reader C:  Is Ding Dong a possible Chinese name?

Me:  Certainly.  Ding is a low-frequency Chinese surname (surname first in Chinese, remember).  There was a famous 20th-century writer named (well, pen-named) Ding Ling ─ she gets a good write-up in Jonathan Spence's The Gate of Heavenly Peace.  Dong is a common syllable, often used in given names.  The "tung" in "Mao Tse-tung" is a Dong in the new spelling.  Statistically there must surely be Ding Dongs in China, though I have never met one.

Though it's probably outside the bounds of Political Correctness nowadays ─ what isn't? ─ there is much innocent hilarity in Chinese names.  The Hong Kong telephone book ca. 1972 was printed up for both Chinese and Western readers: the latter version listed many subscribers with the name Shit.  I am told they have since been . . . purged.

(The New York and London telephone books contain many Shits too, no doubt; but they conceal themselves behind pseudonyms.)