In my haste to get up this morning’s post before my foreman arrived on the jobsite, I messed up Mr. Cort’s first name, and it occurred to me that it might be prudent to let it be known upfront, before I begin meeting more people from around Rhode Island, that I’m horrible with names. If I happen to mess up yours at any point in the future, please don’t take it as a lack of interest.
To a more-than-normal degree, my grasp of language is based on sense, sound, and associations, as opposed to, say, definitions and images. Consequently, as I meet more people in life, I find those markers stumbling all over each other when it comes to names. So, for a reason that I haven’t bothered to investigate, in the context of a beach-club political gathering, the sound of “Bob Cort” just seemed more correct, in my utterance on the fly, than that of “Hugh Cort.” It certainly doesn’t help that my daily activities keep my head spinning. (Although things may improve now that I don’t have to remember the acronyms for every type of data storage technology…)