'Padding' Up Schitt’s Creek: How Dirty Words Get Clean
SmartMouth hangs out on the corner of culture and communication. The act of naming happens to be one of my keen professional interests as a brand marketer and trademark consultant. I like naming babies too.
With this installment, I’m happy to sit back for a change and turn the Smartmouth reins over to a guest blogger ‒ my professional colleague and former professor of psycholinguistics, Mike Kelly, Ph.D. Enjoy this brief excursion through names and the ingenuity of the English language in masking or muting sentiment through creative spelling.
Nine Emmys testify to the appeal of a sitcom that kept viewers engaged and laughing for six seasons. But before anyone had ever heard of Moira, Johnny, David, and Alexis, viewers were already hooked on that provocative one-in-a-million title. Who, after all, could resist at least taking a peek at a show called Schitt’s Creek? By using the flexibility of the English spelling system to slip in a couple of extra unpronounced letters, the creators managed to say on TV one of George Carlin’s seven words you can never say on television.
“Schitt’s Creek” works so well because the creators cleverly borrowed a familiar device in English orthography that “pads” proper names with extra letters to disambiguate them from common words. Along with initial capitalization, the doubling of final letters in surnames like “Pitt” and “Penn” clearly signals in writing that they are proper names, distinguishing them from mere common words like “pit and “pen.” More importantly, letter doubling helps insulate proper names from the meanings and connotations of their common-word homonyms. Ideally, surnames like “Grimm” and “Sadd” should not imply that someone is disinclined to see the bright side of life, and letter doubling erects a barrier that helps to prevent such semantic leakage.
These examples suggest a hypothesis: There should be more pressure toward padding of names with negative sentiment – to avoid connotations that might otherwise transfer via psychological “contamination” from the surname to the person. If true, we would expect, on a proportional basis, more cases of padded surnames with a negative sentiment (like Sadd, Glumm, Robb, and Grimm) than with a positive sentiment (like Gladd, Starr, or Hugg).
Analysis of census names bears that out. Although positive surnames far outnumber negative ones, there are twice as many padded negative names in the US Census database as there are padded positive names. That’s consistent with a bias in all languages toward words that have a positive sentiment – both the number of such words and the frequency with which they are used. This padding pattern is a clear signal that English (and its users) want very much to “clean up” or neutralize names with negative connotations, assuming they’re not prepared to change them altogether. On the other hand, nearly everyone is content to tap the positive sentiment of a cheerful-sounding name.
One last point, in case you’re wondering: “Schitt,” “Shitt,” and “Shitte” do not appear in the US Census database of surnames. And neither do various padded versions of the seven other words you’re not supposed to say on TV. It looks like some words simply can’t be cleaned up, even with a little padding.
