Don’t Call It Shirley

There’s a great scene in the movie Airplane! where Dr Rumack (played by Leslie Nielsen) is approached by Ted Striker, a former fighter pilot who must now fly and land this passenger plane.

Surely you can’t be serious, Striker quips.

I am serious, Dr R responds, and don’t call me Shirley.

Shirley Temple didn’t mind being called Shirley, but surely she didn’t appreciate the drink named in her honor. The Shirley Temple is ginger ale with grenadine and a cherry added in, so it’s incredibly sweet.

In fact, it was way too sweet for Shirley Temple herself, who took a company to court over the issue in 1988—not because it was too sweet, but because of the name. Soda Pop Kids had a new cherry-flavored bottled soda called Shirley T, marketing it as The Shirley Temple SoftDrink. Soda Pop Kids tried to defend the claim by saying it was like Xerox or Kleenex, and had become a generic term over the last 50 years or so.

Shirley Temple (the person, not the drink) won the court case, and now no drink sold in bars or restaurants is ever called a Shirley Temple! The end.

She really did win, though, and she sued others for trying to name things after her without her permission.

Shirley Temple wasn’t the only Shirley where the name was significant. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley, a husband and wife are trying to have a child, and they badly want a boy. When they end up with a daughter instead, they keep the original name they wanted: Shirley.

Prior to this 1849 publication, Shirley was actually considered masculine. It was generally a last name, but whenever it was used for a first name, it was usually masculine.

Don’t call me Shirley takes on an entirely different meaning.