I used to work with a girl who had more than a hundred first cousins. Seriously. It's a thing.

This conversation somehow reminded me of a youthful exercise in pedantry.

My junior year in high school, our school play was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The brothers were named Adam, Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank, and Gideon, and it scares me that I remember that. I don't remember my own character's name, just that I was Ephraim's bride.

Anyway, the heroine of the play, upon marrying Adam spur-of-the-moment, going home with him, and discovering she's to keep house for not one but seven men, comments upon their fine-sounding Bible names, except that she doesn't remember a Frank in the Bible. A brother responds, "Tweren't no F names in the Bible, so Ma named him Frankincense 'cuz he smelled so sweet."

(WHY do I remember lines from a play I was in in 1988? This is scary.)

Pedant that I am, something struck me as Not Quite Right, so I went home and got out my parents' Bible concordance and confirmed that there were, at the least, a Felix and a Festus to be found in the Bible.

Remarking upon this to my drama classmates did not improve my popularity and coolness.

I know Jinger. But it it J as in jump, and inger as in ... ing(the verb tense)-er. She's chinese.

-t, my heartfelt sympathies. My wish is you only get happy surprises and find your feet firm on the ground.

Okay, it's actually better that the 16th one has a J-name, too.

Whew. I was feeling badly for the littlest misfit in that family. Now I think I'll just say, "Eeeeeew."

Here I was hoping for news re: mom post-surgery. I'll be thinking of you guys...

That dress refund lady: may all those clothes she's going to buy smell kinda garbagey, like her stinkin' aura. May she get dumped on her birthday. May she suffer from an impromptu bodily noise very soon. The noive of some people, pfei.

Finally heard from the hospital. My mom's nurse called because my mom's throat is messed up from being intubated. The surgery went fine and I'll know more tomorrow. But she is back in her room and doing ok.

Oh! Is Jinger supposed to be pronounced "Ginger"?? Oh.

Yep, Jinger=Ginger. Methinks if they had to mess with the spelling, they could've made the pronunciation a lot clearer by going all the way and making it Jinjer.

they could've made the pronunciation a lot clearer by going all the way and making it Jinjer

Or Jinjur, which actually has a tiny thread of literary precedence, being the name of a rather cool girl general in the army of the Land of Oz in one of the later books.

Susan, I was reading through your description of your 7 Brides pedantry and nodnodnodding. I was exactly that pedant (though not with exactly that show). Fortunately, I was at a performing arts high school crammed to the gills with band and dance and theater geeks so nobody's pedantry was ever a problem, but if I'd gone to the shiny little well-funded sleek suburban school everyone expected me to go to, they would've cut me to ribbons.

IONameN, today in past medical records I came across a girl named Emiliee. What the hell? iee isn't a name suffix, it's a cartoon sound for a big cartoon man screaming like a little girl. Everybody knows that.

There was a baby at my mother's church named Emileigh.

Speaking of pedantry, the funniest moment of the day was watching two punctuation/grammar/typo perfectionists spend 30 minutes comparing notes on a 10 page section of this GIANT ECONOMY SIZED document.

Good news: I cut 60 pages from my section; it's now a 329 page PDF. Bad news: I'm still at work finishing a crucial piece.

But, it's close. Very close. And for the first time since the university knocked me down to hourly (thanks to the new overtime rules), I'm happy, because at 4pm on Friday it's pay me overtime or I'm taking the office credit card home, see you Monday.

Of course, this means I may have to work Saturday (pick up document from FedExKinko's and ship it to DC), but I'm fine with that for time-and-a-half.