S K-B to Tomasz: "lost gloves"...widely worn and commonly misplaced in most of VN's social-generational settings...gloves and hankies are regularly dropped deliberately by female predators... Clare Bishop drops a glove _and_ leaves a package behind in the Paris restaurant (RLSK) and Matt: You are on a slippery slope to deny the "reality" of PF's The Book of Names ... I claim that a book translatable into English as "The Book of Names" is ...demonstrably factual! You'll see that a book of names can be (and usually is) more than a straight list of names as mooted and ridiculed...]
Matt to S K-B:Shade says that CK is the author of "a remarkable book on surnames," of which there is an English translation. ...VN probably had something like Baring-Gould's "Family Names and Their Story" in mind, since that is where he himself gleaned the names and/or backstories for names like Lavender, Bretwit(z), Fyler, Campbell/Beauchamp, Lukin, and Shalksbore/Shakespeare. "My name is Allen a Dale." Dale is often "dall"; Tindall stands for Tyne-dale. Udall is the yew-dale. Sometimes Dale is corrupted into "dow" or "daw," as Lindow or Lindaw... if yew is "tas" in your language, will it make sense that it comes from Udall? The whole project seems sufficiently unlikely to me...
 
JM: I just found a popular article on Homer and Darwin(Cf. Jonathan Gottschall, "The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer"). Apparently warriors were more intent in impregnating women ( they were a scarce item then) in order to garantee their biological immortality than being turned into dead immortal heroes. Helen had no need to drop gloves, hankies and panties.
Gloves make their appearance in Bend Sinister, after Krug looses one while in mourning and, much later, drops the other close to a bridge. As Kinbote states, like "reality"... "happy" is something extremely subjective. One of our sillier Zemblan proverbs says: the lost glove is happy.. I would follow the itinerary of VN's gloves along his work as intently as he pursues a comb or a lorgnon all through Anna Karenin to The Lady and the Lapdog, aso, while providing us with amusing adventures and critical views.  
And I agree with you, "a book of names can be more than a straight list of names", considering examples of name-fetish* and a lot more besides that: L’if...The yew in French. It is curious that the Zemblan word for the weeping willow is also "if" (the yew is tas) - i.e:  perhaps- potato- peut-etre-God. Or in yew-wye ...tas-...Udall? (help!!!!)
 
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*-In a volume of the Young People's Encyclopedia[...] A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this "Haze, Dolores" (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses — a fairy princess between her two maids of honor. I am trying to analyze the spine-thrill of delight it gives me, this name among all those others.
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