The dapper gentleman on the left is Abrose Bierce (1842-19??).
As you can tell, something’s not quite right with his name.
My theory is that his parents didn’t understand English phonology.
Having stuck their kid with the name Ambrose, which was crime enough to begin with, they didn’t understand that if you say his two names together you get an /s/ sound right up against a /b/ sound (ambrosbierce). That’s a sound combination that doesn’t occur in English, so it makes it hard for people to say or understand his name. I’m sure people were always trying to turn his name into "Ambrose Pierce," and as a life-long victim of name confusion, I know how scarring that can be.
You’ve also got some echo going on between the /b/ in Ambrose and the /b/ in Beirce.
And we won’t even go into his middle name, which was probably the horror that drove him to become a satirist and horror author. (SPOILER SWIPE FOR THE BRAVE OF HEART: His middle name was Gwinnet).
PierceBeirce was an interesting guy. You may notice that his death date has a couple of question marks in it. That’s because we don’t really know when he died.
He vanished.
In his seventies he went on a tour of Civil War battlefields and after touring Lousiana and Texas he went into Mexico which was undergoing a revolution at the time and Bierce hitched up with Pancho Villa’s army as an observer.
The day after Christmas, 1913, he wrote a friend:
Good-by — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!
Nobody ever heard from him again! No news of his getting stod up against a wall or anything! Searchers failed to turn up hide or hair of him (literally!). So we don’t really know when he died. Probably late 1913 or early 1914.
A fitting end for a horror author.
Expecially one with such a horrifying name.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MAN WHOSE NAME WASN’T QUITE RIGHT.
OBTW, the reason I mention Beirce is that I’m going to be excerpting one of his works, The Devil’s Dictionary, which is a dictionary with humorously subversive and often revealing definitions.
F’rinstance:
DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
Amen, Brother Bierce! Amen!
But wait….
The /s/ in Ambrose is pronounced as a /z/, so the /b/ that follows comes out just fine. Compare Italian words like “sbaglio” where the inital s has to be pronounced /z/ so the b won’t sound like a /p/.
Exactly. If his last name were Pierce, one would be tempted to say his first name with a hard (unvoiced) /s/ instead of the soft (voiced) /s/.
Am I also cursed with a name not quite right?
“Hi, I’m Jack Grimes.”
People are constantly hearing “Jack Rimes” or “Jack Ryan”(!)
Is it the too-subtle transition from hard /k/ to soft /g/?
Count me in as one who doesn’t have a problem with Ambrose’s name (including his middle name). Sounds (and feels) fine to me when I say it.
And as for the Devil’s Dictionary, it is a great work! I gave my son the Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary for Christmas two years ago, and he regularly quotes from it. A couple of his favorites:
CAT, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
and
CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
‘thann
It never occurred to me before seeing his middle name, but I wonder if Bierce was of Welsh descent? Ambrose is a common anglicisation of ‘Emrys’, Gwinnet (in any spelling) is anglicised ‘Gwynedd’ (a place name which is not too uncommmon as a Welsh middle name). Swapping p/b/- is common in surnames too – the Welsh term “son of” is ap or ab, so from the “ap Rhys”, you get in English Reese, Rice, Breese, Price and several other variations. Bierce isn’t too far off.
Raspberries!
Oh, wait, that’s a /z/ sound, isn’t it?
Of course, I do the same thing to Ambrose Bierce’s name too: I say it “Ambroze Bierce.”
And now I know why!
His middle name was “Gwinett” which means “Almighty God.”
No kidding, see:
Rawls, James J. “Calfornia: An Interpretive History” 2003, pg216.
If it makes anyone feel any better my real name is Crystal Gem Perl.
The dapper gentleman on the left is Abrose (sic) Bierce–might be nice if you spelled his FIRST name right. It’s Ambrose.
Ironic that you have misspelled his first name in the 2nd line of your web page.
Greetings,
Wietze (often misspelled as Weitze)
The dapper gentleman on the left is Abrose Bierce (1842-19??).