For obvious reasons, this name has lost its popularity after WWII. I was curious to see whether there were people who still named their children Adolf, and to my surprise I learned that the Spanish and Portuguese version of the name, Adolfo, had not been completely ostracized. But the rest of the world still despises this name.
Or does it?
There is a character in H. Beam Piper’s novel “Little Fuzzy” whose name is Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard. Let’s be honest: that’s Adolf. The novel is written in 1962, and Adolphus is not a negative character.
Are you aware of the existence of any other post-bellum usage of this name?
thanks, I had tried to upload a pic of the graph itself - which wouldn’t take.
when I found that site - back around the time my firstborn was due (24 now), Adolph was one of the first names I checked, because I expected the result.
his name is Liam, and I think I started the upward trend
Where I grew up, our neighbor across the street was named Adolph, and that’s what he went by. And he was a minister. I don’t know how old he was, but I’m pretty sure he had ten years or more on my parents (born in 1945). I assume he had the name before that other guy came along.
We don’t host pix here. If you want to display a picture you created, host it on some public-facing thing like imgur, GDrive, etc. Make sure it doesn’t need a login to see. Then post the link here to the pic there.
In my time I’ve known a single Adolf. I was a youngster in the '70s and he was a teenager in my neighborhood. No one ever called him anything but “Ade-o”.
I wonder how many RW douchebags who’re fired up about “88” and all the rest of the numerology have changed their names, or at least their online monikers, to Adolf SomethingOrOther.
I met an Adolfo once. He was around my age. This was maybe thirty years ago, so I was around thirty.
He was handcuffed to the bed next to me in the shitty part of Elmhurst Hospital, in Queens, New York City. That’s the part where they put you if they bring you to the hospital from Riker’s Island. Or, in Adolfo’s case, if you were body-packing cocaine into the country and one of the balloons starts to leak, so you turn yourself in to avoid, well, death.
Or, in my case, if you really smashed yourself up in an accident and don’t have health insurance. I didn’t get handcuffed to the bed, though. But almost everyone else in the room (eight beds) was.
We were neighbors for more than a week, if I remember right.
I was born twenty years after the end of WWII. I’ve never met a person named Adolf (or Adolph); I imagine that the name is probably ruined for Americans for the indefinite future.
Or, as my dad used to say, “You never see anyone named Pontius Pilate anymore, either.”
You still don’t see the name Benedict in the US very often and that was much longer ago.
To continue this hijack, whenever you call out one of those 88 shitbirds on their name they will inevitably claim that 88 was their uniform number in high school football. Their is clearly an amazing coincidence between borderline racist trolls and that number on football teams.
A rough survey. Wikipedia lists one hundred and thirty people whose first names are Adolf or Adolph. Of this sample group, only nine were born after 1945. So it does seem the popularity of the name went into a sharp decline.
I also found that there were twenty-seven people named Adolf or Adolph born between 1900 and 1930. So it apparently is not just a case that the name was already in decline before Hitler came to power.
And I found there is an Indian politician named Adolf Lu Hitler Marak who ran against candidates named Frankenstein Momin and Billykid Sangma in a 2013 election. Which indicates an level of parental whimsy in India that I was unaware of.
When I was in high school, one of my classmates had a brother named Adolf. The family is Jewish. They always called the brother “Dolph”.
There’s also a Chinese brand of personal care products (shampoos, etc.) called Adolph with a silhouette of you know who wearing a trench coat on the items. The introductory price was 88 (because that’s a good luck number in China). Quite unfortunate choice.
A few Korean businesses have created a stir by naming their outfits after Hitler, too.
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez is a Mexican-born journalist who works for a number of media outlets in the Los Angeles area, including the local NPR affiliate, KPCC. I can’t find his birth date in a cursory search, but he looks much younger than 75 to me.