"I think Justice Scalia would correct you and say it was a Saint Thomas More hat, rather than a Sir Thomas More hat."

Said Astro in the comments to the post about the hat Scalia wore to the inauguration.

I responded saying that "the truth is that the reason I used 'Sir' is that it was the caption on the Hans Holbein painting," but the comment got me researching what's the right way to refer to More, and Wikipedia's article begins: "Sir Thomas More... known to Catholics as Saint Thomas More...." So, it seems that the failure to say "Saint" is the shibboleth that reveals that I'm not Catholic. In which case, I don't think Scalia would correct me.

Notice my tendency to reinforce my original choice — which involved little thought — with additional reasons. That's the lawyer instinct. What happened happened, and now that I'm challenged, I furiously brainstorm reasons why it was correct. (What's not lawyer-like is to concede that and display it like this.)

Another reinforcement for my choice is, as I wrote in the comments at the first link:

It's a Sir Thomas More hat, that is, a hat that he wore in his role as a knight. There is no "saint hat," or if there is — maybe you get issued a hat in Heaven — it's not that hat.

It's like, say a cowboy died and was later beatified and we had a picture of him in his cowboy hat. Cowboy Bob. If I adopted his hat, it would be a Cowboy Bob hat, not a St. Bob hat.

I'd like to think Justice Scalia would be intrigued by this language usage question, whether the noun hat calls for the modifier Sir rather than Saint — even for those who revere him as a saint — because it's not a saint hat.

ADDED: Astro did a Google images search for "saint hat," with hilarious results. Before clicking on the link try to guess what 3 types of hats come up most often. It's not this:

"Must you always be out in that ghastly clown suit, running around annoying people?"

Says Pretty Alice to the Harlequin in Harlan Ellison's "Repent Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman," which I read on the urging of commenter Icepick because of the way it reflected on the recent news stories about Aaron Swartz, David Gregory, and the Boston ban on drinking games.

I downloaded this Orson Scott Card collection — "Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century" — which included "Repent Harlequin," because I wanted to understand this harlequin/ticktockman distinction, and lo and behold here's the harlequin — actually, what do you expect? he's a harlequin — wearing a clown suit, when just 5 days ago, the bloggism of the day was clown suits. We were pimping clown suits.



It's weird how these themes seem to coagulate on their own.



IN THE COMMENTS: Astro said points out that my Picasso clown isn't a harlequin. I need to be better about specifying the Commedia dell'arte characters. Here's a Picasso harlequin (on the right):