Noted lj user gets pissy over on Tumblr

[koganbot]

In a shock to my many fans, I get pissy with nice-guy desnoise* over on Tom's Tumblr, the subject being "PBS" and "Poptimists" and "Indie," perhaps, if those are actual subjects.

*I think that's Marc Cohen, but correct me if I'm wrong Hogan.

Comments

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Is Marc Hogan, of Pitchfork fame.

[koganbot]

That's what I meant! I unconsciously gave him a variant on my last name. In any event, he is a nice guy.

[koganbot]

Tellingly, what I did to Marc's name is similar to what Marc (and lots of others) do to my ideas. They substitute their expectations for what's actually there, in order to simplify. Every other "Marc" I know who spells his name with a "c" at the end is Jewish. So my mind wanted to give this Marc a full Jewish name, hence put the Jewish "Cohen" in place of the Irish "Hogan." It might have made even more sense to give Marc the Jewish name "Kogan," except that that's a mistake I would have noticed.

"Kogan" and "Cohen" are spelling variants of the same name, "Kogan" being what you get when you transliterate from the Cyrillic script. (I have no idea what the name looks like in Hebrew or Aramaic or ancient Greek.) And interestingly there are several Irish surnames that run near "Kogan" and "Cohen" though I don't know if they are variants on each other; I assume their similarity to the Jewish is coincidental: Hogan, Cogan, Coogan, Cohan.