I have one of those names that can be spelled several ways (and the different ways are attributed to different countries) I’m Claire but I have met someone who spelt it Clare and the way most people seem to want to spell it is Clair. I have to keep telling them to add on the e.
I’d love to name my child some interesting name but one thing that shocked me was that I thought I had made up a name for one of my characters in Role play but someone really does have the same name only its spelt faintly different. (They got onto ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ which is how I know) It’s Merile (the character) and the person spelt it Merrilee. I pronounce it like merrily.
A couple of my cousins have interesting names too. There is Kenzie MacDonnell and I found out Kenzie is a celtic boys name but that cousin is a girl. Then my youngest cousin is Rhys Hugh MacDonnell. I never really know how to say Rhys so I say it ‘reez’ though I have been told its pronounced ‘reeve’.
If I have a daughter I would love to name her something like Chrysalis (or Chrys for short), Amara Chandra, Mara or something like that. I don’t like my name much (Ruth Claire) and have thought about changing it but there are so many names out there that I like I’d probably never make up my mind. At least I didn’t end up as Mary Rose (which was the other one Mom was thinking of). It’s not a bad name just I don’t like it much.
This is actually a well-established practice, e.g. Johns Hopkins (as in Johns Hopkins University, founded 125 years ago) was a real person.
There have been some interesting studies (both scholarly and less-than-scholarly) on this subject. I’ll see if I can dig up some citations, if anyone is interested.
I have absolutely no problem with mixing ethnicities. After all, if your mom is of English extraction and your dad is of Spanish extraction, should they be banned from using half the family names available to them? Doesn’t seem fair to me.
Yes, but “Johns” was his mother’s maiden name. The practice of using family names as given names (viz. my middle name) is quite different from using random last names as first names.
It’s interesting that people who use last names as first names generally choose very WASPy names. You never hear of a kid with a first name like Impagliatelli or Gerstein. Hmm.
I got your back on this one Attrayant. When I was in 8th - 10th grade or so, Topper was the head meteorologist at the ABC station in Knoxville, TN. We had hours (ok, so it didn’t take much to entertain us) of fun laughing at his name.
I found the Name-o-Tron!
Within moments, I had the girl name “Madwanda”, and the boy name “Tomfy”. Imagine the fun of introducing oneself at the playground…:^)
Ooops…I forgot that quotation marks don’t work in the title line. That was supposed to read:
Here is a “Petri Dish” that may be contributing to the outbreak:
Tell that to James Joyce’s brother – Stanislaus. As Irish as the day is long, faith.
Ceili is simply the Gaelic word for ‘music’, which is a perfectly appropriate and lovely name for a lassie.
To rhyme with A’isha? (which incidentally is a genuine Arabic name, and a very popular one.)
Your friend has got to be pulling your leg, right? I thought that “Vagina” as a name was just one of those urban legends. It was cited over at Snopes.
Some backwoods mother had just given birth and was overheard to say she thought “Vagina” was a nice-sounding name. Has that lilt to it, you know. A nurse hearing this was horrified and whispered in the mother’s ear what a vagina really is. The mother said: “You can’t fool me! That ain’t no vagina . . . That’s a COOCHIE!”
Honest-to-God, we have a meteorologist here in Phoenix who does, indeed, pronounce it “Seen.” Unsubstantiated rumor has it that he has a twin brother named “Shawn,” but that both twins’ names are spelled “Sean.” Go figure.
I always said that, if I had a daughter, I’d name her “Victoria Rose.” (Hey, I’m a traditionalist.) Then I married Mr. Dailey, whose last name is an adverb. Meaning that the name becomes a sentence: “Victoria Rose Dail(e)y.” Sigh. Back to the drawing board…
The “Lemonjello” and “Orangejello” has got to be an urban legend. I’ve heard it from so many different people in so many different communities…
Then there was my classmate, whose name was Coral Delight (Delight was her middle name). Needless to say, she wasn’t too thrilled with it - as an intelligent woman, it was really difficult for her to get the respect she deserved!
I was puzzled by the last-names-as-first-names business for a long time, then I finally learned how it started. Apparently the practice of giving a child a first name and a middle name that make up the first and last name of a famous person or relative is more common than I realized (for example: George Washingyon Carver, or Martin Luther King, or any of a number of Robert Heinlein protagonists). What often happens is that the first name gets dropped and the middle name is used as the effective “first name”. And so a name migrates from surname to first name.
Nowadays, though, I suspect a lot of parents short-circuit this process and simply choose a last name as a “first name” simply because they like the way it sounds.
I don’t have a problem with this. (I don’t have a problem with “Kevin Jaworski”, either. I grew up in a largely Polish town, and I’m not particularly fond of “Stanislas”. So don’t condemn us to ethnic-only names. Some of us LIKE the name Kevin.)
I would actally rather have a somewhat odd/unusual name, than be boring and average. There are so many Jessica’s in my school. There are three within my little circle of friends. Whenever someone says Jessica no one knows who they mean. It sucks.
I’m gonna change my name from the oh-so-boring Elizabeth Anne to Kylique Camibree.
Jeez, that sounds like some weird new underwear: Try the new Camibree from Kylique!
It is an urban legend. It’s even on Snopes. However, it’s also true. I’ve met a pair of them. In DC. Honest - we’re talking a first-person account here. Just because something’s in Snopes doesn’t mean it never happened. In fact, I found Snopes after meeting the twins. I was reading through it, ran across that page, and was upset that my life had, apparently, been a lie.
Anyway, back to the OP. The local news did a story around the first of the year on the most, uh, unique names of the year 2000. My favorite was “Hewstyn” for a girl. They flashed the name on the screen and the voice over said, “Hewstyn? We have a problem.” Pretty clever, actually.
There’s actually a girl at my school names Chrysalis, the teachers always get confused about whether to pronounce it CHRYS-alis or Chry-SA-lis. It’s actually a really pretty name though it keeps bringing up flashbacks from past years of science. We just ended up calling the girl Chrys, she’s a real tom boy anyway.
“Andy” in my user name is from my middle name, Anderson. I have a cousin whose first name is Anderson, and my grandfather’s last name is Anderson. We all use Andy.
My parents, both teachers for 35+ years, swear up and down that they’ve run across Female, pronounce to rhyme with tamale, and Latrina in the course of their teaching careers. (These particular names were run across in the 70s.) As a young child, when I asked why people would name their kids something like that, mom told me that it was racism, plain and simple. The mothers of these children were poor, black, and uneducated, and they simply took a racist nurse’s suggestion.
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Most obvious cross-ethnic name I’ve ever heard: Juan McGillicuddy*
Don’t forget Eamon DeValera. He was the president of Ireland for dog’s years. Half Spanish & half Irish.
