The Universe of Disco

Hebrew John Doe

Last month I wrote about the Turkish analog of “Joe Blow”. I got email from Gaal Yahas, who said

I bet you'll get plenty of replies on your last post about translating "John Doe" to different languages.

Sadly no. But M. Yahas did tell me in detail about the Hebrew version, and I did a little additional research.

The Hebrew version of “Joe Blow” / “John Doe” is unequivocally “Ploni Almoni” (”פלוני אלמוני“, I think). This usage goes back at least to the Book of Ruth, approximately 2500 years ago. Ruth's husband has died without leaving an heir, and custom demands that a close relative of her father-in-law should marry her, to keep the property in the family. Boaz takes on this duty, but first meets with another man, who is a closer relative than he:

Then went Boaz up to the gate, and sat him down there: and, behold, the kinsman of whom Boaz spake came by; unto whom he said, Ho, such a one! turn aside, sit down here. And he turned aside, and sat down.

(Ruth 4:1, KJV)

This other relative declines to marry Ruth. He is not named, and is referred to in the Hebrew version as Ploni Almoni, translated here as “such a one”. This article in The Jewish Chronicle discusses the possible etymology of these words, glossing “ploni” as akin to “covered” or “hidden” and “almoni” as akin to “silenced” or “muted”.

Ploni Almoni also appears in the book of Samuel, probably even older than Ruth:

David answered Ahimelek the priest, “The king sent me on a mission and said to me, 'No one is to know anything about the mission I am sending you on.' As for my men, I have told them to meet me at a certain place.”

(1 Samuel 21:2, NIV)

The mission is secret, so David does not reveal the meeting place to Ahimelek. Instead, he refers to it as Ploni Almoni. There is a similar usage at 2 Kings 6:8.

Apparently the use of “Ploni” in Hebrew to mean “some guy” continues through the Talmud and up to the present day. M. Yahas also alerted me to two small but storied streets in Tel Aviv. According to this article from Haaretz:

A wealthy American businessman was buying up chunks of real estate in Tel Aviv. He purchased the two alleyways with the intention of naming them after himself and his wife, even going so far as to put up temporary shingles with the streets’ new names. But he had christened the streets without official permission from the city council.

The mayor was so incensed by the businessman’s chutzpah that he decided to temporarily name the alleyways Simta Almonit and Simta Plonit.

And so they remain, 95 years later.

(M. Yahas explains that “Simta” means “alley” and is feminine, so that Ploni and Almoni take the feminine ‘-it’ ending to agree with it.)

Wikipedia has not one but many articles on this topic and related ones:

• List of placeholder names by language discusses not only Ploni Almoni and the yellow-booted Mehmet Ağa, but many others as well and related matters, for example the Latin word res (“thing”, “matter”, or “affair”).
  • Oddly, the precursor of the featureless English word “thing” was much more specific, and in Icelandic and other northern Germanic languages it has retained some of this specificity.
• Placeholder name mainly concerns English, but more generally than just unspecified persons. For example, “widget” as a placeholder for an unspecified manufactured article.
• Indefinite and fictitious numbers such as “umpteen” and “zillions”, which I have discussed here before.
• Multiple-use name. For example, “Alan Smithee”.
• Another Hebrew version, this one more analogous to “John Smith”, is Israel Israeli.
• Hebrew Wikipedia has an article on פלוני
• An international list of terms related to an average person, and many individual articles about specific examples such as:
  • Joe Bloggs
  • Jane Doe
  • John Doe
  • J. Random Hacker
  • John Q. Public
  • Joe Schmoe
  • Tom, Dick, and Harry
  • Note that the “Roe” of the famous 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case refers to “Jane Roe”, a variation on “Jane Doe”. Roe's actual name was McCovey.

My own tiny contribution in this area: my in-laws live in a rather distant and undeveloped neighborhood on the periphery of Seoul, and I once referred to it as 아무데도동 (/amudedo-dong/), approximately “nowhereville”. This is not standard in Korean, but I believe the meaning is clear.

[ Addendum 20230423: Every time I reread this article, I am startled by Haaretz's use of the word “christened” in this context. ]

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