Dear Readers:
Dr. Ink pays attention to all parts of the newspaper, from page one headlines to the sports agate, from the display ads for women’s wear to the classified notices of lost dogs.
One of his favorite newspaper spaces is home to the wedding announcements. He likes to look at the handsome couples and the odd couples, imagining how they met and what will happen to them next. He also pays close attention to their names.
Which is why he could not resist the pairing of one Thomas Michael Savage to Miss Audrey Margaret Butt, giving the world the Savage-Butt wedding. Right below the happy couple smiled another set of newlyweds, Jennifer Lynn Keweshan and Kevin Arthur Ache, which led the mischievous Doc to speculate that a swapping of couples would have given us the Butt-Ache Wedding.
Over the years, Doc has heard of many other strange and wonderful names of people and places in the news. One town in Illinois is named Normal. Another is named Oblong. This, according to legend, gave us the headline “Normal Man Marries Oblong Woman.”
In his time on this earth, Dr. Ink has run into a dentist named Dr. Payne, a urologist named Dr. Insoft, a proctologist named Dr. Crapanzano, a copy editor named Addie Rimmer, a baseball player named Charlie Spikes, a basketball player named Willie Cager.
Twenty years ago, a man driving a yellow Buick Skylark came less than two feet from tumbling over the broken edge of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge some 200 feet into Tampa Bay. The man, a used car dealer, was named Richard Hornbuckle.
Reporters work in the same poetic tradition as Homer who so loved the sounds of names that he created long lists of them: the names of ships, the names of tribes at war. If you see an interesting name in a story, chances are the journalist worked hard to get it in there, so have fun with it, whether it’s relevant to the news or not.
