INTRODUCTION
The work of the Office of Nomenclature Stabilization can be said to have started in the period 1949-1951, although its full organization in its present form—the voluminous files, the worldwide network of correspondents—only came later.
In one of those years John Train, then studying for a Master’s degree at Harvard in Comparative Literature, noticed in Collier’s magazine a Mr. Katz Meow, of Hoquiam, Washington. He mentioned it shortly afterward to Professor Howard Mumford Jones, who replied that during World War II he’d had a secretary named Miss Pensive Cocke. Soon after, Train reported this to a graduate school colleague who observed that while in uniform he had processed the Army discharge of a soldier named Welcome Baby Darling (now of Greenwich, Connecticut). Train, bemused, wrote all this down in the back of his notebook.
A little later in H.L. Mencken was discovered Positive Wasserman Jackson, and in Winston-Salem, N.C. Bunyan Snipes Womble and his son Cadwallader Wellington Womble.
Later sources provided Miss Caresse Pecor (University of Vermont, 1971) as well as Doctor Ovary, a gynecologist at New York Hospital … and, of course, Madame Ovary.
In any event, Train felt a scholarly obligation to open a proper dossier to record the particulars of these discoveries, which seemed to have relevance to his then field of Comp. Lit.
The problem was to assure accuracy. In general, a documented source is required. One can scarcely go through life without appearing in print somewhere, at the least in a telephone directory, and with enough time a written authentication can usually be unearthed.
In the early ’50s, Train moved to Paris. He was part of the group that founded this Review, of which he was for many years Managing Editor, while continuing his work in nomenclature.
The roster grew, as did the network of reliable correspondents. Some of the most valuable have been Joseph Fox, of Random House; Robert Myrhum, of CBS; Candida Donadio; Charles Harding, Chairman Smith, Barney & Company; and S.J. Perelman, of The New Yorker.
(Additional submissions are warmly welcomed, by the way; always, however, with the fullest available documentation.)
In time, a formal organization of the work became inevitable, and the Office of Nomenclature Stabilization took shape, crystallizing into its present form.