Don't call me Shirley/Buddy.

The file on the police investigation of the Wisconsin Supreme Court "chokehold" incident contains accounts of 2 incidents in which someone used a too-familiar name and the immediate consequence was an inappropriate touching. In putting these 2 accounts together here, I don't mean to vouch for their truth. I simply want to juxtapose them for the purpose of examining their similarity.

First is the "chokehold" incident itself, as described by Justice Ann Walsh Bradley (page 34):  Justice Bradley said when she approached Justice Prosser, she said to him, "Buddy, get out of my office." Justice Bradley explained that the sobriquet "Buddy" put her "in control" and Justice Prosser "in the diminutive." By "in the diminutive," Bradley meant something like making him seem small or putting him in the state "of being familiarly known, lovable, pitiable, or contemptible." There were accompanying gestures from Bradley, and, as we know by now, Prosser proceeded to put his hands around her neck.

In the second incident, from 2008 (page 64), Justice Gableman "remembers making a comment to the chief justice in a joking manner and used her first name, Shirley, during this comment towards her."

Justice Gableman said right after he said the chief justice's first name, Justice Bradley came over to him, hit him on the back of the head and told him that he needed to show respect to the chief. Justice Gableman said that he believed Justice Bradley was not joking because nobody was laughing at the time. Justice Gableman said he has not told anyone about that incident and has not talked about that incident with anyone, including Justice Bradley, after it happened.

In both instances, a name is used and it's Justice Bradley who regards the name as disrespectful. In both instances, the name immediately precedes a regrettable touching. In one instance, Justice Bradley is the person who says the name and receives the regrettable touching, and in the other, she hears the name and performs the regrettable touching.

In the first instance, the person who used the name did so with an intent to express disrespect, and the named person is the one who does the touching. In the second instance, the named person's reaction isn't even described. We don't know what the Chief Justice thought of Justice Gableman calling her "Shirley." (It's simply her first name, not a diminutive.) It is Justice Bradley who imposed the interpretation of disrespect and who inflicted retribution (in this story, as told by Gableman, whose veracity remains in issue).

So we have 2 stories depicting Justice Bradley as having a heightened sensitivity to the wounding effect of an over-familiar form of address. In one, she deliberately uses a hostile epithet to diminish and control someone who is already the target of her anger. In the other, someone becomes the target of her anger after he uses someone's real name in what seems to have been a reasonably friendly if awkward effort at conversation.