Word: cooperman
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...powerful agents for good or ill. In the adult world, name-calling is considered the dirtiest form of fight. Elaborate libel laws rest on the premise that a name can do real damage. Individuals clearly expect a variety of benefits when they take on new names. For Ellen Cooperman, becoming Ellen Cooperperson was ostensibly indispensable to her liberation. When he planned to run for Governor, Maryland Attorney General Francis Boucher Burch, long called "Bill," legally adopted the nickname with its suggestion of a common touch-but reverted to Francis Boucher after he withdrew from the race. Out of a simple...
Common sense and reality have both been affronted regularly in the anti-discrimination war. The feminist movement's drive to desex nouns and pronouns was definitively dramatized by the 1976 case of Ms. Ellen Cooperman, who unsuccessfully sought to change her legal name to Coo-perperson. But God only knows-if, indeed, He or She does-how much needless fear of words has been generated by the campaign to cleanse public language of slander, denigration and defamation. It has obviously reduced the use of contemptuous epithets, but it has also unnecessarily inflamed some tender sensibilities. Take the heartfelt claim...
...Ellen Cooperman, 30, is an ardent feminist. She is a member of the National Organization for Women and runs her own business, producing feminist films in Babylon, a Long Island town 37 miles east of Personhattan. Personhattan? Well, if Ellen...
Three years ago Cooperman decided that she could no longer tolerate the word man in her surname because of its sexist connotations. So she began using the name Cooperperson in her business and private life, explaining that it served as "a consciousness raiser." Soon friends were calling Ellen, who is divorced, and her child Brian (a nine-year-old male person) the Cooperpeople. But when her bank and credit-card companies steadfastly refused to list her as Cooperperson because it was not her legal name, she went to court to legitimize her name change. Her petition stated that Cooperperson "more...
...expose it to unjustified ridicule" and would "have serious and undesirable repercussions, perhaps throughout the entire country." The precedent, he wrote, might well lead not only to such "inane" name changes as Manning to Peopling and Carmen to Carpersons, but even to words like mankind becoming personkind. Says Cooperman, who plans to appeal: "I'm all for that...