Farley Fee Fratt and Peanut Butter Lewis

This nonsense dredged up from the past is Wade's fault.

In a June 7 comment on "The closest calendrical approximations of pi," he wrote:

What's more, we recently discussed the significance of "P" (as in black-eyed p).

Now, pi (rhymes with "pie") in classical Greek, is customarily pronounced pi (rhymes with "pea").

In order for P to resonate with "Pharazôn", it would by rights have to be phi (rhymes with "fee").

One of my younger brothers, when he was very young, used to make up nonsense variants of names found in the Doctrine and Covenants. I don't know why I have such a photographic memory for this gibberish, but I do. One of his creations was this set of names:

Parley P. Pratt

Barley B. Bratt

Farley Fee Fratt

Marley Mee Mratt

In order to preserve the alliteration, Messrs. Fratt and Mratt got middle "initials" that were not pronounced in the standard way, and their "etymology" is that they are variants of Mr. Pratt's middle initial of P. So, as in Wade's comment, we have Fee as a variant of P.

The other thing Wade has been commenting about is his idea that I'm supposed to be some sort of priest or something, and that recent syncs related to levitation are actually meant to draw my attention to the similar-looking word Levite. This led me to write, in a June 7 comment on "It is impossible for people to fly -- but they did":

There's some French joke about being a Marxist of the Groucho variety. If I were a Levite, it would be of the Eliphas variety.

Éliphas Lévi, the 19th-century French priest-turned-magician, whose influence on all subsequent "magical" thought cannot be overstated, was born Alphonse-Louis Constant and created his nom de guerre by choosing Hebrew names that were superficially similar to his given names. Thus, in his case, Lévi was derived from Louis. He is not the only one to have made the connection. The surname Lewis can be a variant either of Louis or of various Jewish surnames deriving from Levi. If these names are considered interchangeable, that makes me a "son of Levi" by virtue of the fact that my father's name is Louis.

In yesterday's "Jam I am," I posted this picture, which includes an anthropomorphic jar of peanut butter with the initials PB on his breast pocket. 

This -- together with my thoughts on the name Lewis in connection with Wade, who had also just reminded me of Farley Fee Fratt and company -- made me think of another of my brother's sets of names:

P. B. Lewis (Peanut Butter Lewis)

P. B. Lewis (Philip Butter Lewis)

P. I. Lewis (Peanut Butter Lewis)

P. A. Lewis (Papa Lewis)

These people all had to be referred to by both their initials and their full names in parentheses, since there were two different P. B. Lewises with different middle names and (somehow) two different Peanut Butter Lewises with different initials. This reminds me of how Bill's comments are always signed "William Wright (WW)," with both his full name and his initials.

At one point, my brother wrote a short and intentionally confusing a story about the four Lewises, but it didn't make it into the Commentarius Coccineus, and I don't remember any of the details.