I was reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, and in it one character addresses someone just waking up from a long nap as "Rumpelstiltskin". I take it on faith that the mistake is meant to make the character seem like a dink. Still, I start to go a little crazy, because I can’t remember what the allusion should have been.

The name of the guy who spins straw into gold in exchange for first-born children is running interference against the one who slept for twenty years, and I can’t come up with anything other than "Rumpelstiltskin".

Eventually the words "Sleepy Hollow" pop into my head, and I figure the solution must have some of those letters or the same number of syllables or the same rhythm or something. I play around with this theory for a while, getting more and more frustrated, when it dawns on me that I’m thinking of Sleepy Hollow because Washington Irving wrote the story about the character whose name escapes me. Which means there’s a good chance it’s a Dutch-sounding name. And now I’m really annoyed, because if I can remember Sleepy Hollow and Washington Irving and even Brom Bones and Katrina Van Tassel, why, why, why can’t I remember Rip Van Winkle?!!

Phew. Take that, Rumpelstiltskin.