[Chris O'Carroll]

Fundamentalists who regard Hecht & Hollander's Jiggery-Pokery as scripture will indeed insist that once a six-syllable word has been used, it is ever thereafter out of play. In my view, if ever a rule was made to be broken, that one was.

I also take a loose constructionist approach to the question of what counts as a name. I've done "Headmaster Dumbledore" and "Pope John XXIII" double dactyls. John Whitworth has done an "Emperor Julian." Martin Parker has done a "Rodgers and Hammerstein." I'd be surprised to learn that nobody had ever done a "Gilbert and Sullivan." And there's no shortage of appellations -- "Philip of Macedon," "William the Conqueror" -- that could be challenged as not being actual names in the strictest sense, even though that's what everybody calls the people in question.