Tell you what

One thing I really like about the show King of the Hill is the clever use of names. For example, the massive, oppressive Walmart equivalent on the show is the Mega Lo Mart. This works both at the character level — you can imagine the owners talking about how their prices are not just low, but mega-low — and also at the audience level, by evoking megalomania. (Are there technical names for those two levels?)

The other day, Adult Swim re-ran one of my favorite episodes, “A Beer Can Named Desire”, in which the B plot is a Tennessee Williams pastiche involving Hank’s friend and neighbor, perennial loser Bill Dauterive, visiting his family in Louisiana.

What I just now realized is that the name of the Dauterive estate — Chateau D’Haute Rive — while being a plausible source for the name Dauterive (and literally meaning “house on the high river”), also evokes the words cat, hot, and roof.