Word: cognomens
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...spirit of--virtually every celebrity from high art (Toscanini, Natalia Makarova) and popular art (Roberto Benigni, Natalie Wood). Through his pen, inanity became animate, and caricature met character study. The fun in a Hirschfeld sketch increased after 1945, when his daughter Nina was born. He began concealing her cognomen in and around his portraits of famous men and women--in a Gwyneth Paltrow gown, in a Groucho jacket fold--placing a numeral next to his signature to indicate how many Ninas appeared therein. It was the niftiest Sunday parlor game, a gift from the Shavian Santa who, with the delineation...
...sadness of realizing there will be no more Hirschfelds is compounding by the prospect of no more new Ninas. So as a tribute to Mr. A. and Miss N., we have concealed her cognomen in and around the text of this column. How many are there? Look at the subhed. How many can you find? That...
Ivan IV, Tsar of Russia from 1533 to 1584, was not, strictly speaking, terrible. That cognomen came from a mistranslation of the Russian word grozny, which means something closer to "awe inspiring." Yet in just about every other sense, Ivan was ghastly enough...
...first dons silks, walks to the paddock and gets a leg up on a Thoroughbred race horse, the public knows him as a jockey. But around the track, he is called a boy. It is an odd inversion of status for these masterful men, a class cognomen left over from the days when jockeys were servants of the sporting aristocracy. Age does not matter. The rankest apprentice is a boy; Willie Shoemaker?at age 46, the winner of more horse races than any man in the sport's history?...
...politician -votes, that's what. The name Kennedy wins elections in Massachusetts; Taft does it in Ohio. In Illinois, Stevenson -coupled with Adlai, of course-is a good bet; and Brown breeds governors in California. But in Texas, the game of political names calls for a Yarborough, a cognomen that has meant liberal votes in the Lone Star State for a generation. Ralph Yarborough, 73, was in the Senate from 1957 to 1971. Another Yarborough, Donald H., 50, a Houston lawyer and no relation, ran unsuccessfully three times for Governor and almost beat John Connally...