Tedium - On “Ernie” 🤖

Today in Tedium: Unless you’re Elton John or Lady Gaga or Elliott Smith, you generally don’t get to choose your name. It’s chosen for you, or you inherit it. I inherited my name, a two-syllable dynamo that, in lower-case form, barely expands beyond the x-height of the fonts that display it. (Only the “i” pokes its head out, like an alphabetical periscope of sorts.) It’s a weird name, I fully admit, which makes it somewhat memorable. I’m not a Chad, or a Paul, or a Mike. I’m an Ernie. But it’s that unusual nature that leads it to be used in unusual ways—as you might have heard, one of the most famous Muppets on Sesame Street shares my first name—and it’s perhaps for that reason that I’m writing about it now. I just learned that Baidu, the second-largest search engine in the world, is about to launch an AI chatbot, and it’s named Ernie. Crap, I thought (though I didn’t say “crap,” instead uttering another four-letter word). My name is in danger. I need to do something to protect it. Maybe writing something might offer a reasonable shield. Today’s Tedium looks at the roots of Ernie, and considers why Baidu might have found it a fitting name. — Ernie @ Tedium

Why yes, I’ve heard the song “Rubber Duckie” before. Why do you ask?

Why “Ernie” is the perfect example of a hypocorism

Ernie didn’t start as Ernie. As noted by Wikitionary and other places, the roots of Ernie started as something closer to ernustuz, a term with Germanic roots, which reflects a certain sense of seriousness or strength. (Pretty sure Sesame Street and Ernest Goes to Camp tag-teamed to totally ruin that nomenclature, but I digress!)

To put it another way, Ernest has evolved over time from a lengthy German name to a name that that escapes borders and is commonly shortened in an oddly piercing way.

Despite the oddity of this name—I don’t know about you, but I don’t run into many Ernies throughout my day to day—I should point out that there are a lot of people there named Ernie, and a lot of them specifically named Ernie Smith.

I am not the most famous Ernie Smith. Glenroy “Ernie” Smith, a Jamaican reggae musician, is. Here’s his most famous song. Enjoy.

The Wikipedia disambiguation page for Ernie Smith lists seven separate Ernie Smiths, none of which are me, while the related disambiguation page for Ernest Smith has 13 entries. I know of at least three separate successful musicians named Ernie or Ernest Smith, numerous athletes, and at least two generations of Ernies that came before me. (As far as I know, I’m the only Ernie Smith that is a modern-day journalist, though I haven’t looked closely.)

Now you might be wondering: Why do people shorten this name from Ernie to Ernest? (Or, in Sheryl Crow parlance, why is it that when his name is William, is she sure it’s Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy?) That’s because of the concept of the hypocorism, a Greek-derived term that essentially means “pet name.” Yes, we not think of it as such, but Ernie is a pet name, a sign of affection in nomenclature. By not calling me Ernest, you’re showing a sign of appreciation towards me.

These phrases have a tendency to evolve over time, much as the English language itself has. The linguist Peter Trudgill has noted that strongly formal names like Ernest likely evolved into their less formal forms, like Richard to Dick, or Edward to Ed to Eddie, to help support poetic rhyming schemes.

As Trudgill wrote for The New European back in 2020:

But there is another interesting development which can occur in the case of names like Edward: Edwards very often get called, not Ed but Ted—or even Ned.

Nicknames like Ted have been in use ever since the Middle Ages; and it is intriguing to think about how these particular hypocoristics came into being.

They clearly resulted from a playful process which involved speakers in taking an abbreviated one-syllable hypocoristic name and replacing it with some rhyming syllable. Other hypocoristics of this type included Bob from Robert via Rob, Bill from William via Will, and Nell from Helen.

Other well-established nicknames which were arrived at as a result of the same sort of ludic process include Dick from Richard, and Peg from Margaret, though in these two cases other complications came into play.

By that logic, it’s easy to see how we got Ernie. Ernest does not lend itself to an easy rhyme, but a name like Ernie, which ends on a long “e” sound, ends as many other words do.

(Another effect of this, which is not the case for Ernie, is that the push to make names work better in poetry would lead to names with fewer syllables, like Michael to Mike.)

This gradually led to less formal name structures, which have over time become more common. Hence, Ernie.

(Everyday basics/Unsplash)

Why must we humanize the names of our chatbots?

I mean, if a chatbot is coming to steal my name, I wouldn’t be the first. I’m sure the legendary triathlete Siri Lindley cursed a little the day she found out that there was going to be a chat assistant on everyone’s phone named Siri.

I’m sure everyone named Alexa must hate that when someone calls their name at home, a bot is competing for the actual person’s attention. And I bet you if Sydney Pollack was still alive, he would be pissed that Microsoft decided to give its search engine’s chat engine the nickname Sydney.

I mean, even I’m a little guilty of this. In 2009, when I started ShortFormBlog, I decided it would be a clever idea to create a mascot for this site, which I named Julius after my middle name, which I’ve never been a fan of, as a way to take ownership of this thing I never really liked. But I never thought about how other Juliuses would feel about it. Maybe I should have called up Julius Irving for his thoughts.

In all seriousness, though, I do sort of wonder why large technology companies do this. The closest I got came from a Fortune interview that David Limp, the senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon, did about seven years ago:

We did go through a number of names and the name is important as much for the personality that it creates around the persona than is this computer-based voice computer in the cloud. But there’s computer science behind it, too…[I]f any of you have Echoes, you know that it only wakes up when it hears the word Alexa, and the phonics of that word and how that word is parsed and the fact that it has a hard consonant with the X in it, is important in making sure that it wakes up only when it’s asked for. And so, a combination of those two things allowed us to kind of narrow in on Alexa.

(It also helped that they already owned the Alexa name, having purchased it many years ago from Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, the founders of an early search engine-turned-archival service. Kahle used the money from that purchase to fund the growth of the Internet Archive.)

It makes sense why companies would want to do this for purely practical reasons. After all, by giving something a name, the odds are that you are less likely to trigger it by accident decline sharply. After all, think about how easy it is to trigger Google, a much more widely used phrase, in comparison to Alexa, a term that (unless you have someone in your life with that name) you will probably not say quite as often. Google is, famously, a verb, so it’s much easier to say in common parlance.

In the case of Baidu, Ernie is not a particularly common name in the market which it serves. (If this page is to be believed, you can call me 厄尼.) If it was in America, even, they would find a lot of people like me who hold onto their Ernie identities but for the most part, it is not overwhelmingly common in culture.

So Baidu is going to have users chatting with Ernie; it’s going to have people asking for Ernie’s help in their cars. Soon, Baidu is going to make Ernie a household name for literally hundreds of millions of people in one of the world’s largest markets.

In many ways, as much as it will frustrate me personally, it is likely the right way for them to go.