This month, a reader's letter helped us get to the bottom of a long-standing Prospect mystery. Where does Edward Docx's surname come from? How is it pronounced? And what came first: the Word document or the novelist? All is revealed in the correspondence below:
I enjoyed Edward Docx’s account of his journey to Russia (November). But am I the only reader to wonder how one of Prospect’s contributors came to be named after a Microsoft Office file extension?
Phil VernonTunbridge Wells
Edward Docx replies:
Dear Mr Vernon, thank you for your note. I sense you are a man of rare originality and perception. But in this case you have the order of derivation the wrong way round.
I come from a long line of File Extensions stretching back to the early Plantagenet period. However, it was only during the second world war, when my grandfather was captured by the Japanese while serving as a File Extension in the British army, that he first met Bill Gates’s uncle, then serving (as a Gate) in the US marine corps. The two POWs became friends while constructing the bridge on the river Kwai. One afternoon, during a well-earned break, my grandfather found Gates’s uncle to be uncharacteristically despondent. So he took it upon himself to tell him a joke, the punchline of which was: “another fucking tortoise!” So funny did Gates’s uncle find this joke—alas, we have lost the first part—that he vowed to survive the ordeal and return to America so that he could steer his entrepreneurial nephew, Bill, into setting up a business that would celebrate and promote File Extensions around the world. The rest is history.
I enjoyed Edward Docx’s account of his journey to Russia (November). But am I the only reader to wonder how one of Prospect’s contributors came to be named after a Microsoft Office file extension?
Phil VernonTunbridge Wells
Edward Docx replies:
Dear Mr Vernon, thank you for your note. I sense you are a man of rare originality and perception. But in this case you have the order of derivation the wrong way round.
I come from a long line of File Extensions stretching back to the early Plantagenet period. However, it was only during the second world war, when my grandfather was captured by the Japanese while serving as a File Extension in the British army, that he first met Bill Gates’s uncle, then serving (as a Gate) in the US marine corps. The two POWs became friends while constructing the bridge on the river Kwai. One afternoon, during a well-earned break, my grandfather found Gates’s uncle to be uncharacteristically despondent. So he took it upon himself to tell him a joke, the punchline of which was: “another fucking tortoise!” So funny did Gates’s uncle find this joke—alas, we have lost the first part—that he vowed to survive the ordeal and return to America so that he could steer his entrepreneurial nephew, Bill, into setting up a business that would celebrate and promote File Extensions around the world. The rest is history.
