Question of the week #14

[treonb]

The writers of this show seem to have a love for full formal names when it comes to the KGB side of the Cold War. Philip is always Philip, never Phil, and Elizabeth is never Liz or Beth either--and this despite the fact that Russian names all inherently have multiple alternate forms that everyone simply uses as a matter of course. The same goes for Robert, the other Directorate S illegal who we've met, and for that matter, for Gregory (who's not Russian, but whose own culture isn't exactly known for its lack of informal names).

Given this, the question of the week is a two-parter: one, what do you think the writers are up to with this? And two, any thoughts on an explanation for this that works within the world of the show?

You can expect spoilers for the entire first season in the comments.

(There's no expiration date on these questions, so if you're reading this post months later and feel like jumping in, please do.)

Comments

[sistermagpie]

Thanks for the info! I knew there had to be some diminutives--it seems like it would be impossible for a name in Russian not to have them. I just remember somebody somewhere saying it was a little different--maybe just in the way those forms were originally arrived at or something.

Interesting! Can you expand on what you mean by this?

Mostly I was just thinking about how in English a nickname tends to be more about the person than the name itself. A person named Robert isn't automatically called Rob or Bob in certain situations. It's more usually that the person just "is" a Bob or a Bobby or a Robert. I find it hard to think of my brother as his "real" name, or even the most common nickname for his real name because I've never called him either; he once told someone they had a wrong number because they asked for my real name. That sort of thing.

So I could see even in a culture where most people went by first names/shortened first names or nicknames Gregory might become known as Gregory and nothing else. Like in The Wire there's a lot of characters with nicknames--Cheese, Bodie, Poot, Stringer. But then there's characters known by their real first names like Omar where the real name carries so much respect it becomes a street name in itself, if that makes sense.

But again with Elizabeth I can imagine her just by default being slow to use any American nicknames. She says Stan because nobody uses anything else but she might prefer full names in general. Heh. She might even privately for a long time have considered American nicknames kind of stupid and weak.

[jae]

Yeah, you're right--English names do work differently from Russian ones on that front. (Like your brother, I'm another person who never gets referred to by the long form of her name, actually.) I guess I just have such a hard time imagining that Gregory would always have been Gregory to everyone, though. He's just not that formal a guy, and such a thing would have been utterly bizarre in his culture (like, if 'Omar' were a name with a common short form, I can't imagine that his inner circle wouldn't have called him that). So it seems very likely to me that this practice came from Elizabeth, and that Philip picked up on calling him that because Elizabeth did. I really do like the idea of her being slow to use American nicknames...

-J