There’s an Agatha Christie story in which a government official is named Vitamian Evans. Googling Vitamian gives us mainly English misspellings of “vitamin,” as well as foreign-language references that seem to indicate that vitamian means vitamin in various foreign languages (or else that it’s a common spelling error there as well).
So tell me: Vitamian? What? Has anyone ever heard of this name at all in any context? Was our Agatha just staring at a bottle one morning and said, “Hey, this sounds like a good name for a character!”? Legitimate name, or completely made up for no reason?
In case you were unaware, people can make up any name for children as well, or to rename themselves.
When John Glenn went into orbit for the first time, there were children named in his honor, as John and Glen, but also Orbit !
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that they weren’t! But the thing is that Christie is not what could be called revolutionary when it comes to naming characters–very few have names that are wildly nontraditional–and it would be unusual for her to simply make up a name out of thin air, especially for such a minor character (who, iirc, is only mentioned once), which is why I wondered if the name had an origin other than Christie’s little grey cells.
One interesting Christie surname is “Beddingfeld” - one would normally expect this to be “Beddingfield”, but it’s definitely “-feld” throughout original copies of the book (The Man In The Brown Suit) despite reviewers often getting it wrong.