Alliterative Aliases and Alcoholic Articulations
There's a surprising (and perhaps annoying?) amount of alliteration in character names in comics.1 Whether it is intended to be a clever play on sound or have some other purpose is not entirely clear, although the late Stan Lee claimed that he used the convention to make it easier to remember the names of characters that he created.
When we were brainstorming what kinds of drinks to make for this week's cocktail countdown segment, and how we might tie them together thematically, we decided to start with Rachel's desire to improve on what she thought was a poor choice of a name for a cocktail meant to honor Lois Lane. Given the alliterative appeal of her name, and that we had already tossed around the idea of going with greens before diverting our direction and looking to Lois, Jon decided to give a nod to another alliterative alias for his next elixir experiment: J'onn J'onnz the Martian Manhunter, whose alias John Jones is an equally alliterative appellation. As you'll soon see, alliteration abounds throughout our cocktail considerations for this weeks cocktail countdown.
1
Wait... alliteration? Are we sure? Is it alliteration or is it assonance? They're vowels, not consonants, right? Well, after adequate appraisal, we have assessed that it apparently is alliteration after all. The initial sound is a glottal stop (therefore a consonant), meaning pretty much any sequence. The fact that we used A's in all of the words of the main title was just visual icing on the cake. Assonance, on the other hand, would have been something featuring the same vowel sounds within words. Consider this example from literaryterms.net:
Fire at the private eye hired to pry in my business.