Re: Ice tea and Robin Hood

On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 03:04:23PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> I think that's because "Robin" is not felt to be a name here; it's only
> the 375th commonest male name in the U.S. (about 0.032% of the population
> in 1990), so "Robin Hood" is naively interpreted as a nominal compound
> "robin" + "hood".
Oh, I think "Robin" is definitely felt to be a name.  It's much more
common as a female name than a male one over here, but even so, people
emphasize, e.g., "Robin Leach" normally, on the surname (not that he
needs any additional emphasis).  I think all that's going on with "Robin
Hood" is that it's become lexicalized into an unalalyzed name; we don't
think of him as someone whose first name is "Robin" and last name is
"Hood" (which it wasn't anyway) any more than we think of "King Arthur"
as a man whose first name is "King" and last name is "Arthur" - or, for
that matter, even as a king named Arthur, most of the time.

-Marcos