You Hereby Have Permission to Call the Monster “Frankenstein”
You know the situation, or some version of it. You’re telling friends a funny story, perhaps about a weird Christmas party you attended. “The DJ was dressed like Frankenstein,” you say, “and he only played theme songs from old cartoons.”
“Wait a minute,” snorts your most pedantic friend. “You mean Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Yeah,” drools your second-most pedantic friend. “Unless he was dressed like a scientist!” They snicker pathetically, congratulating each other on knowing the single most basic fact from a book everyone read in high school.
Meanwhile, your anecdote is as dead as the pig in a corn dog. No one even asks why a guy at a Christmas party was dressed like Frankenstein or if he played the “Inspector Gadget” song.
If something like this hasn’t happened to you, then, my friend, you are the pedant.
Here’s the deal. Outside of discussing/reviewing the novel itself, outside of academia or critical work, in normal, everyday conversation between people who aren’t somehow forsworn to suck the joy out of everything, it is okay to call the monster “Frankenstein.”
If you don’t want to just blindly accept the word of a random, however highly passionate, person on the internet, here are some arguments you can use in…
