Don’t forget that he got promoted to Major, so he was Major Major Major Major.
“Nobby” is just a nickname based on his last name, though. Nobby’s real first name is Cecil. Cecil Nobs is a pretty ordinary name, although his full name is a bit sillier: Cecil Wormsborough St. John Nobbs.
It was the real name of a 15th century Dutch artist, though. One of my faves (I’m sick).
I think that L. Ron Hubbard naming the hero of Battlefield Earth Johnny Goodboy Tyler ought to get him some sort of prize.
I kinda like Wolfgang Asmodeus Mogart from Jack L. Chalker’s And the Devil will Drag You Under, myself.
Horatio Hornblower
HORNBLOWER!!!, come on
I know almost no French (hablo Español), but I’m guessing that in English this is Peter Rabbit?
I’m usually tolerant of odd names, and have used plenty in stories myself, but I almost stopped reading Anne Tyler’s Back When We Were Grownups because of the names: NoNo, Patch, Biddy, Min Foo…these would be embrassing nicknames for preschoolers, and they’re middle-aged women!
Missing from that list is Uriah Heep from Dicken’s David Copperfield.
Good 'ole Wikipedia.
Zaphod Beeblebrox!
You’re not the only one. I’ve always thought that name was more appropriate for a character played by Groucho Marx or W.C. Fields.
Yep.
From the Ebeneezum and the Wuntvor trilogies: Plaugg ( a god ), Ebeneezum ( a wizard ), Wuntvor ( the Eternal Apprentice ), the Grand Forxnagle ( a spell ), and the Urracchat ( spelling approximate; a cult named after the last sound their victims make )
And Constable Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets.
And Guxx Unfufadoo.
As for a new venue, even serious fantasy is replete with silly names for the characters, but Modesitt’s The Spellsong War series has a particularly egregious example. The heir to the throne of this totally alien world where they don’t even speak English is Lord Jimbob. No joke. It pulled me out of the story so abruptly and completely on his first appearance it was like someone had turned on one of those junkyard electromagnets and I was made of iron.
:smack: How could I forget the Omnians?
Also: the witchfinders in Good Omens.
ETA: It took me quite a while to get Visit’s name. Then one day I realized that it was a play on visit as in visit-the-heretic-with-plagues.
It’s under H for Heep, not U for Uriah.
Also: Bilbo Baggins.
Except that Hornblower was a genuine surname. Real people do have strange names sometimes.
Speaking as someone whose genuine surname was used for a very well known cartoon family, I got very sick of having to explain that yes, it’s my real name, and no, it’s not particularly funny.
His mother’s name was Belladona, his father’s name was Bungo, and his father’s siblings were Belba, Bingo, Longo and… Linda? But is it fair to count Middle-earth or other creations of high fantasy and sci-fi? In large part, the names aren’t supposed to sound like anything in our world. The ones like Sam and Rosie are the exceptions.
If we are going to include The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, we can at least be thankful for the names he could have used but didn’t, such as Nerwen and Teleporno.
All of the Hobbit names were translations, actually. For instance, Meriadoc Brandybuck’s untranslated name is Kalimak Brandagamba. Peregrin Took is actually Razanur Tuk. Names that are identical to real-world flowers and such, like Belladonna or Daisy, are most likely supposed to be translations from the Hobbitish.
Nitpick: Westron, or Adunaic (which is of course the Westron word for Westron). Hobbits don’t have their own language, aside from a few novel words of their own like “mathom”.
Genghis Cohen, AKA Cohen the Barbarian, is also a recurring character in Pratchett’s works, though of course it’s supposed to be silly there. He’s 80-something years old, and people often underestimate him because of his age, not realizing that in his line of work, you don’t live to be very old unless you’re very, very good at what you do.
It is Westron, but an old-fashioned and “ruralized” Westron, more akin to the language of the Rohirrim than that of Gondor. It’s definitely meant to be a separate dialect of Westron. The whole thing has added complications in that the words that Tolkien uses in the primary story aren’t the words that the characters actually use, because of the conceit that Tolkien was “translating” from the Red Book of Westmarch.
I don’t know, I think I’d wear ‘Flintstone’ with a certain pride.