Don't blame him for what you're thinking he's obviously doing

Bill Cunningham is "a bit of an historian". He's now on a campaign to continue the traditions of respect for presidential candidates.

"You might recall Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight David Eisenhower and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, William Jefferson Clinton. The man who would be president...normally the middle name is employed in order to give the man more dignity and more respect."

So that's why he insists on using the full name of Barack Hussein Obama.

His goal: "simply to state the fellow's name much like I often say John Sidney McCain the Third."

His intentions are his own to know -- and the rest of us can only make judgments based on his probable rhetorical interests.

(listen to his NPR interview with Robert Siegel)

I might never be able to prove it, but this looks like a relevant twist on the question I posed a while ago about loaded terms. The intention in question: why use language that's both accurate and loaded.

Cunningham claims it's because it's accurate.

I believe it's because it's loaded.

Facetious terms

Later in the interview Siegel asks Cunningham what he thinks of John McCain choice to denounce the use of Obama's full name with divisive intentions.

[~4:50]

Sad -- it is very sad for a gentleman who did not hear what I said -- who has met me several times but has forgotten about it he might have half-heimers -- the guys gettin' a bit old. It is sad when he forgets meeting me and then having not heard me he criticizes words that I didn't say, that he didn't hear, and then throws me under the Straight Talk Express.

It's new play on Alzheimer's. The old joke was the eggcorny joke: 'old-timers'. The joke is now with 'Alz' apparently being analyzed as the 'all' morpheme. So if full dementia is of the All(z)heimer's type, temporary mild or selective memory loss is of the Half-heimers type.

Google™ hits.

"halfheimers"    749
"half heimers"   590
"halfheimer's"   85
"half heimer's"  57