Talk:Blago

? (Del, Rdr, Dab)

   A dozen or so edits (3 of them deleted at once) have been devoted to this title. Perhaps a modicum of research will suffice to finally put the matter to bed:

1. Blago Zadro has existed 55 months without anyone worrying about whether even Zadro (his Croatian surname, not a Hungarian given name) would be used in an attempt to reach the war hero's bio. (I just started the surname page w/ 2 entries, FWIW.)
2. The apparent sole occasion for making a Dab of the original Rdr was responding to an otherwise undiscussed DB request.
3. That DB request's suggestion of "improbable typo" is demonstrably false -- Chicago Sun-Times (don't know its circ, but it just got a Pulitzer) seems to have used it about 370 times on its edited pages (at least, but certainly not mostly, by linking there to its own Blago Blog -- which appeared on a domain outside the range of that search).
4. The DB requester's alternate suggestion -- "and / or slander" (uh, slander requires falsehood, for the record; they mean "ridicule") -- might be a defensible reason for not having "Blago" appear in the lead of the article, but is not a valid objection to its existence as a title (or as a Dab entry), where it is seen only by the user who types in "blago", either
   1. looking for RB (bcz they apply "Blago" to him), or
   2. -- far-fetchedly -- having no interest in RB but unable to recall or spell the surname "Zadro", or
   3. thinking of naming their kid Blago (in which case they may really welcome the alert that some people may consider it a taunt!).
5. The DB requester seems not to have considered the greater likelihood of those naive to Serbo-Croatian orthography and having typed Blagoyowitz, Blaghojavec, and a half dozen other permutations, trying blago in desperation.
6. (Well, going on beyond a "modicum": it's not easy to exclude hits that are too new!) This 2002 abstract from Crain's Chicago Business strongly suggests that it is a long-standing and pretty neutral nickname; it's plausible he considered it a man-of-the-people touch that furthered his political ambitions.

For all those reasons, primary-topic dab'n is more reasonable than "equal" dab'n, but a non-distracting & unobtrusive Rdr is better. If anyone prefers some form of Dab'n over my reversion to the original Rdr, i find it hard to imagine my having anything further to say.
--Jerzy•t 05:18, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

   (The human imagination is such a poor tool: here's one more thing to say after all.) All of those Slavic -witzes and -viches etc are just like -son in Johnson and -sen in Jensen, and Blago is a given name (whether Serbian or Croatian). So addressing someone named "Blagojevich" as "Blago" is like addressing Douglas Peterson as "Pete", not like addressing George Schmeltzer as "Schmel".
--Jerzy•t 05:48, 9 September 2011 (UTC)