Catholic art.

[Rev. Rye]

Sort of like a younger Trump referring to Reagan as "Ronnie" to emphasize his own fictional significance and closeness to the powerful.

It's the same sort of inappropriate familiarity that we get in situations like the Gulf Wars. Bush and Blair were referred to in the media by their titles, but Saddam Hussein was always called by his first name, to reinforce a pecking order. To illustrate, imagine if the Iraq Times ran reports such as "Yesterday, the city was bombed by George and Tony".

Of course, I do occasionally use such a form to belittle famous figures, largely to denigrate them. For instance, I seriously considered writing a review of Denial for my column (but it was vetoed because the boss does not want to cover a film about Holocaust deniers on his Anglophile website), and just to show what I thought of the historians featured in the film, I'd have called (because they're the two biggest historians in this field) Robert Evans (and possibly Ian Kershaw, if I felt the need to bring him up) by either their full name or their surnames. With regards to David Irving (antagonist and disgraced historian), I suspect that if I actually wrote it, there would be a lot of "Davey-boys" to demonstrate how far he's fallen (and rightfully so).

Also, I suspect that the media calling Saddam Hussein by his first name was partly out of convenience. Hussein is an extremely common name in the Arab world (both as a given name and a surname), but Saddam is significantly less common. It's telling that, on Wikipedia's page on the name Saddam, only two of them were born before Saddam Hussein rose to power; one was a former head of the Republican Guard and the other was Saddam Hussein himself. Also, the fact that "Saddam" sounds similar to "Sadist" and other related words (and I've heard it pronounced as a homonymn with "Sodom" as in "Sodom and Gomorrah") must certainly have helped matters. I can't imagine that things would be quite the same with "George" and "Tony," even in Iraq