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Claim: Newspaper reporter falls for the old "funny name" gag.
Origins: There are certain gags you expect to be old hat to everyone past puberty, such as the standard suite of " A familiar amalgam of the latter two japes is the giving out of names that appear innocuous in written form or sound plausible when pronounced slowly but produce racy or embarrassing combinations when uttered out loud at a normal speaking pace (e.g., Hugh Jass, Anita Bath, Mike Rotch), a joke usually enjoyed by duping a switchboard operator into paging someone using one of those names. (This is a running gag that Bart Simpson repeatedly pulls on Moe the bartender in the animated TV series The Simpsons.) As I said, I'd expect everyone past junior high school to recognize these old routines from miles away, but I've been proved wrong before
Some of that local frustration was evident Saturday morning during the hour-long protest, when people in passing cars shouted derogatory comments like "Burk go home" and honked their car horns in support of Johnson and Augusta National's refusal to change its policy.
The reporter responsible for this story acknowledged his embarrassment in a Throughout the morning, law enforcement officers stood on the perimeter of the five-acre field. At no point did the protest turn violent, though officers escorted Heywood Jablome away after he held up a sign directly in front of Burk that read "Make me dinner" before shouting "Oprah rules."
I'm a legend — and it only took two words to make me one.
It's good to see that even a creaky old joke can still occasionally make the grade, and that someone who falls for it can be gracious in owning up to it.
It all started Saturday afternoon at the Masters in Augusta, Ga., while covering the protests outside the gates of the Augusta National Golf Club. With a swarm of reporters, police and protesters there for Martha Burk's high-profile stand against the club's male-only membership policy, one man held up a sign reading "Make me dinner" before being escorted away by police. Once off the protest site, the man talked with about a dozen reporters and identified himself by a bogus name, a name that, while appearing innocuous enough on paper, refers to a sex act when sounded out. Unfortunately, I never actually heard the protester's name pronounced, just caught him spelling it out for others and jotted it down in my notepad. I wrote the story for Sunday's paper, tucked the quote down near the bottom, filed it to my editors in Charleston and blithely went about my life, unaware that this one name was about to make my own name known around the country. On Monday afternoon, thanks to some astute readers with a vivid recollection of elementary school vernacular, I realized I had been duped. Last updated: 29 June 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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