Million?
My Mom’s problem with it was the “dred” part.
Funny story for all you with Mildred’s in your family. There is apparently a wild life park who has a mascot named Mildred the Bear. When my brother was younger he and some buddies did a cross county road trip and he came home and presented our Mom with a picture of one of the billboards. It’s funnier if you actually knew her. She was well known to have a rather ursine personality.
My Grandmother was Agnus. Never shot a dog in a quarry.
Or Miller, the announced name for my soon to arrive granddaughter. She’ll be going by ‘Millie’ or 'MJ".
My paternal grandmother’s name was Grace, and it was rare until about 20 or 30 years ago when a ton of recent Chinese immigrant women I knew took it as their American name. My maternal grandmother’s name was Roszalea, but she always went by Rose.
My mother’s name was Irene, and the only other Irenes I knew were Mexican-American. Oh, and my dad’s name was Herbert…he was a junior and HATED it.
Probably not. These were younger women, and Joan Crawford is a pretty dated reference for their generation.
And the Kate Winslet mini-series of Mildred Pierce is probably too recent (2011) to have been influential.
It is a mystery. There just aren’t any prominent pop-culture (or high-culture) appearances of the name in the past forty years, really.
Well, “Pink” is basically a mild red, so maybe?
If my name was Mildred, I’d definitely go by “Dred”.
Even if your last name was Scott?
In that instance I’d change my last name to “Pirate-Roberts”.
I’d go to law school and work to get appointed to the bench.
My grandmother was known as Fridge. I am not too sure why! Her real name was Frederica.
Did she play defensive tackle for the Bears?
I had a great-aunt everybody called Lutzi. I only learned at her funeral that her real name was Regina, I had no idea.
My cousin Jimbo, yeah; we all got one down here(also a cousin named Junior),
But Jimbo’s nick was “Footsie”.
I didn’t think his feets were so big. He was kinda chubby allover, so maybe I couldn’t tell.
My parents’ generation (and social class?) just loved to give everyone nicknames.
Aunt Joey was born Betty Jo, Uncle Wendell was called “Toge”. Years later I discovered that our good friends Bud ‘n’ Denny were actually Harold and Mary.
They’d even mess with the nicknames! Richard and Louise got shortened to Dick and Wheezy, then they got spoonerism’ed into Weak ‘n’ Dizzy.
I had an Uncle Rip. His actual name was Walter, but his buddies in the Navy gave him the nickname and it stuck for the rest of his life.