…like “Heywood Jablome” or “Hugh G. Rection”, that sort of thing.
Yes…
Are you looking for specific examples or just the yes/no answer?
I was looking for specific examples. Though I totally respect taking advantage of an opportunity to give the Mathematician’s Answer…
Since this is going to end up being a series of jokes, let’s move this to MPSIMS.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The name Odysseus gives the Cyclops in the Odyssey one of the more famous examples of this. Outis means “no one” so after the Cyclops is blinded by Odysseus he screams '“Nobody is murdering me” and his friends ignore him.
Two real-life examples:
Lara Clette whose name can be parsed as “la raclette”, a Franco-Swiss dish based on melted cheese and potatoes (very yummy by the way). Her parents claim they didn’t notice until it was too late to change it.
And there’s the locally famous Gérard Manfroy, a retired heating engineer, who says that his name helped his business. It sounds almost completely identical to “J’ai rarement froid” - “I rarely feel cold”.
In fiction, there’s a running gag in Tintin where one of the main characters always mistakenly calls a butcher whose name is Sanzot (without bones).
http://8e-etage.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AffTournesol43.jpg.
Finally, French-speaking children play a game called “Monsieur et Madame… ont un(e) fils/fille” in which you start by saying that sentence (Mr and Mrs [insert weird family name] have a son/daughter) and have people try and guess the given name. The aim is that the combination of the two yields a silly pun. Bonus points if you can make long strings with several names in succession.
http://www.monsieur-et-madame.fr/les-meilleurs-mr-et-mme-debut-0.html
What a delightful name. I could just eat her up. (Raclette is much preferred to its ghetto cousin fondue).
Raclette is much better than fondue, indeed.
Fondue bourguignonne is completely different (no cheese) but even better than either. One of the tastiest dishes I know but it’ll send your cholesterol numbers through the roof.
I don’th ave any specific examples, but other languages do have wordplay and puns, so I can’t imagine they don’t have funny names. My hispanophone sister told me a Mexican dirty joke than hangs on the homophony between “llamame” (“call me”) and “ya mame” (“I just now sucked”, i.e. I just gave a blowjob).
Ok, since you are looking for NAMES not phrases, I can only think of one in Spanish:
Soyla Vaca Del Corral- legitimate name that also says “I’m the cow of the corral”
In Dutch: as a pre-teen My friends and I had great fun having certain names paged in train stations - Pim Mol (sounds like the Dutch equivalent of weiner/schlong) and Dik Kellel (sounds like fat dick) come to mind, and there were others.
“Soyla” is a misspelled Zoila. “Soy la” and Zoila are homophones in many dialects, hence the joke name.
Armando is a legitimate firstname which tends to end up in joke names or in legitimate names that should count as grounds to divorce your parents. It matches the gerund for armar, so it means “assembling” or “organizing”. I recently had an interview with a guy called Armando Amor (“organizing love”): I think I got points just on account of not saying anything about the name.
There are quite a few in German (Claire Grube = Klärgrube = Cesspit; Axel Schweiss = Achselschweiß = armpit sweat; Rainer Zufall = pure coincidence…) but I don’t know if any of these ever happened in real life of if they are just urban legends.
I do know a couple though who basically named their daughter the german equivalent of “Shirley Ujest”. :eek:
I have no idea if it was intentional, but I have the nagging feeling, they just didn’t notice. :smack:
The femenine name “Elba” presents many opportunities in (Rioplatense) Spanish, like
“Elba Lazo” (the gunshot)
“Elba Garto” (the very ugly woman)
“Elba Gon” (the train car)
and so on.
I remember, when I was a kid, that a friend of my father told me his name and I would not believe him. He had to show me his ID papers.
Some explanation first: In Spain, people usually have 2 surnames, one from the father and one from the mother. The combination of name + 2 surnames of this guy was simply lovely…
His name was ARMANDO GUERRA GORDA.
Which, in Spanish, means “Starting/Organizing a big war”.
I never understood what his parents were thinking of.
And this one was from the “Society Section” of a newspaper several decades ago. It is a bit in the vein of the “Lara Clette” of post #5. Quoting (more or less) the aforesaid note:
“Mr. Felipe Laca and Ms. Luisa Gamos are happy to announce the birth of their daughter Felisa”.
If you go by the standard rules of Spanish surname-making, the girl’s name would be “Felisa Laca Gamos” – which sounds exactly like “Felisa La Cagamos”. Which means "Felisa, we shat her up (or, more slangily, ‘we made a complete mess out of her’).
Also, Felisa comes apparently from the Latin for “Happy, Fortunate”. So…
“Our daughter, who was fortunately messed up beyond all recognition”.
Poor girl.