The Generic You

I find it utterly fascinating what sorts of names people come up with when they have to talk about a hypothetical person. "John" is traditional, as in "John Doe." Or "Jane." I find this very boring. Shouldn't Adam be the generic? I mean, he was the biblical first person. Or Eve? (Actually I shouldn't say that: Eve is used as the generic term for certain human ancestors, as in "Mitochondria Eve." If you just thought of a particular late 1990's video game, you are old and you have my respect.)

I often find myself in these kinds of conversations (make of that what you will) and I have come to realize something about my own hypothetical person.

1. It's a man.

2. His name is Jim-Bob.

I suppose it's easy enough to guess why my default person is a man. I'm an American and an English speaker and thus acculturated to thinking of "male" as the default when I have to gender something, despite the very best efforts of one of my favorite professors ever (a philosophy professor) to convince me that the generic should be female because fetuses all start female and things with no real gender (like worker ants) are usually referred to as female. That was a male professor, by the by, for all of you people out there going "stupid self-centered navel-gazing feminists remaking everything all women-centered."

So that's all very well and good, you may be thinking, but why Jim-Bob?

Well, see, I used to switch between Jim and Bob. This is because they are generic man-names and I didn't actually really KNOW any Jims or Bobs, so I can use both those names without anyone thinking I'm trying to talk about someone else (considering some of the predictions of my hypothetical Jim-Bob, this is VERY NECESSARY.) And eventually I think I just kind of glommed them together, and they were reborn as Jim-Bob.

Jim-Bob is not a redneck, although people usually think he is. I can't imagine why. If my generic person was going to be a redneck, I'd've named him Junior.

Jim-Bob isn't my only generic person, of course. There is also Precious Toby. Precious Toby is my generic name for a spoiled child. You know the kind: the super-sheltered, pampered kid whose mummy and daddy intervene the second he gets a "satisfactory" instead of "Exceeds expectations" on his preschool report card for nap time, because the teacher is endangering his future as a dual engineering/philosophy major double-matriculated at MIT and Harvard, or some such rubbish.

I do know a Toby. My dad's pet Yorkie is named Toby. And he is precious. But I am pretty confident that if HE was in pre-school he would exceed all expectations, except for his fixation on humping pillows at nap time.