A FEATURE OF ENGLISH in the past has been the frequent colloquial use of (mainly) first-name people, sprinkled aphoristically across conversations.
I remember as a child hearing the phrase ‘happy as Larry’, and wondering who on earth Larry was, what he had to be so happy about, and exactly how he came to be the benchmark for joy and delight. Then one winter I went on a skiing holiday; my Austrian ski instructor’s name was Larry, and because he was appropriately jolly this put an end to the Larry line of inquiry, hitherto so bothersome.
Larry was not alone. By adolescence, Tom, Dick and Harry (TDH) had moved in. I worked out quick smart that they didn’t actually exist but stood for blokes who might. Handy really, especially when you didn’t want your parents to know precisely with whom you were partying, though in my case it backfired since, being foreign-as-in-ethnic, my folks wanted surnames and then some. There was no way I could have gotten away with referring to a boy I might have liked as Tom, Dick or Harry.
Over the next decade I met a lot of blokes. There was Pete who went everywhere for his own sake; Blind Freddie who was equal parts thick and myopic; Dick who was especially clever; Alec who was too smart by half; and Jack Robinson who would finish what he was doing before you could even say his name. Punch was always pleased to see Larry whenever he popped around, as he did occasionally, his good cheer always a great antidote to Buckley and Murphy (two of the surname exceptions to the first-name rule), who were in a constant state of rivalry when it came to being pessimistic. It’s my view today that they both should have been started on medication much earlier. There was Flynn, supposedly named after our rascal Errol who rarely went outdoors and developed a bad reputation as a sexual rogue, although very occasionally ‘in like Flynn’ meant something other than its crude reading. While on the topic of Flynn, there’s also Roger and Willy, but best let’s not go there.
One constant in this life of flux was Bob, who was my uncle but, strangely, everyone else’s as well. Mostly what I remember about Bob was that he was irrelevant. He’d drop in, along with the statement of kinship (‘and Bob’s your uncle’) which, as far as I could determine, had no relation to anything in sight. Though, of course, he did have a wife—the rejoinder to ‘Bob’s your uncle’ was ‘and Fanny’s your aunt’. For comfort in moments of confusion I’d think back to how Larry had come good on the ski slopes, and I invested faith in the belief that one day, when he was good and ready, Bob’s story, too, would be revealed.
There were multiple Johns. Apart from the dead body (John Doe, husband of Jane), one John was the bloke who got the letters calling the relationship off. Resilient, he’d always bounce back from those dumpings that seemed to develop a ground-hog-day style of repetition. Another John was the rather earnest fellow on mock Commonwealth Bank cheques. His surname was ‘Citizen’, there was an (assumed) wife, kiddies and a mortgage in the background, and one knew that John was pretty unswervingly noble. John Citizen had a cousin who was Joe Average, much beloved of statisticians and social scientists. He was also the middle-class counterpart to the much more layabout and often disreputable Joe Blow. Much more in Joe’s league was Johnny, who had a reputation for showing up once the hard work had been done. Johnny-come-lately’s nemesis was Johnny-on-the-spot, who was any TDH who happened to be where some action was needed.
There was also Joe Sixpack, a less blow-away version of Joe Blow, and as reliable as he was ordinary. And perhaps because John, in all his garbs and versions, was such a common name, it became a euphemism for the men’s toilet. Adam was indistinguishable from himself so if you didn’t recognise him, you’d know it was Adam. Otherwise, it was Arthur or Martha.
And mentioning Martha reminds me that it’s not all about blokes. All-purpose Sheila tried to bolster plain Jane and dumb Dora who both had self-esteem issues, each secretly believing that a name change would fix everything. The quietly morbid Jane Doe was the antithesis of the very superior, if aspirational, Lady Muck, who shared a hot-potato-in-the-mouth accent with His Nibs. If the truth be known, they probably shared more than an accent, having remained thick as thieves long beyond the extra-curricular elocution class where rumour has it they met years earlier.
Surprises usually brought Betsy out while Nelly would crop up when you were being denied permission to do something. This defiant (not on your) Nelly was very different from her namesake, nervous Nelly, who had been on medication for her nerves for as long as anyone could remember. Mention of either Nelly would usually invoke in me thoughts of Larry—a curiousity I suppose that, though I didn’t know it at the time, was the first restless stirrings of an etymological longing. Anyway, I soon learned not to be confused by the Nelly overlap and came to take great comfort in the disambiguating function of context.
The thing is, as a child growing up in a non-native-English-speaking home, I had zero idea that anyone else was on first-name terms with all these peopled phrases that dropped in on a daily basis. And the knowledge, when it came, was less a penny-dropping experience than a slow, dawning realisation. So Mrs Kafoops was anyone (well, anyone female, married and getting on a bit) whose name you’d forgotten. Pat Malone (as in ‘on your Pat Malone’) didn’t actually exist (he just rhymed with ‘on your own’). Nor did Joe Bloggs or Blind Freddie, about whose disability I subsequently had serious doubts. Then there was that whole mob, the Callithumpians, a general term for any eclectic bunch of vaguely related boisterous noisemakers who swept in, made themselves at home and then swept out again.
In hindsight, it was the kind of experience usually attributed to children when they find out the truth about Santa, the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy. But it was bigger than that. The characters who up until then had peopled the phrases that I heard on a daily basis suddenly vanished, their names mere epitaphs fluttering in the breeze.
While back then I might’ve wondered who these people were and how they came to get their names, now I’m more likely to wonder where they went, why they faded out of use, why they seem to have lost their currency. Of course, they’re not all completely disappeared—these things don’t happen overnight. You’ll still hear an irate father trying to pack the family into the car for a road trip, saying, ‘For Pete’s sake, get a move on, will you?!’ However, because Pete might have some slight reverberations of Saint Peter, his currency has devalued greatly in a far more secular age. Indeed, I’d warrant that Pete’s best hope for hanging on to his place would be to sever all connections with his ecclesiastical namesake. Certainly John of the ‘dear John’ letter has long faded, probably pushed out by technology. These days you’re more likely to get dumped by email or SMS than by a long flowery letter that spells out the unpalatable truth in florid detail.
But the winds of change are larger than the new secularism or the Digital Age. In general we live now in a society that relies less than it once did on context for shaping and influencing our values and understandings. Once, when we were a more homogenous and uniform society, we were able to draw on context as a resource for meaning. These days we don’t all share one single cultural context. As postwar Australia has become increasingly heterogenous and pluralistic, people have different backgrounds, call on different milieus. This makes an overarching context less available to all as a tacit, common, shared resource. With context now less available, we give increasingly more store to what is said that can stand alone.
Larry as the benchmark of happiness, or Joe Bloggs as the baseline indicator of ordinariness—they don’t cut it anymore. Larry has lost his credibility. If you uttered the line ‘as happy as Larry’ today, most people under the age of forty-five would not know what you meant. I’d wager that if Larry is going to have more than Buckley’s chance to get back his currency, the least he’ll have to come equipped with is a full name, a CV, a website and his own personalised ring tone.