Sentinel meta: What's in a Name?

The use of a name is significant in our culture. There are entire chapters in etiquette books devoted to the mode of address and even in our more casual society, the move from a formal salutation to the use of a first name is a sign of growing friendship or trust.

We attach importance to each time Jim calls Blair by his first name not because we need it as proof of either of those things; they're a given, demonstrated in many other ways, but because it's so rare. Blair, almost from the start, calls Jim, 'Jim'. Jim, on the other hand, addresses Blair mostly as 'Sandburg', 'Chief' or by a variety of off-the-cuff nicknames, appropriate to the situation (one of the most memorable being 'my little guppy' as he was about to teach Blair to cast).

This reluctance to call Blair 'Blair' is interesting because it's not a reluctance that Jim shows with other people. Simon is Jim's superior, yet Jim scatters his conversations with him with many uses of his first name, moving between 'Simon' to 'sir' and 'Captain'; he's friends with Simon; he feels at ease with him -- but both of those conditions apply to Blair, too.

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The dialogue is all taken from Becky's Sentinel page, an invaluable resource which I use constantly.

Freaky

Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Canadians! We're just leaving to eat dinner with some friends whose pool is still open which makes me go wide-eyed.

Seriously, it's 35 degrees C today. Over ninety! Last year? We had snow. It was a slightly freakish early blizzard that swept through and didn't last, but even so I remember David and my brother going to Oktoberfest in the snow and Phil, fresh from Australia, not liking it at all.

Freaky.

Did someone tell the Winchester boys?