Born and raised in the Queen City, and it never occurred to us while there that it’s rhyme was in any way amusing. Then my brother and I moved to Wisconsin, and every time we mentioned where we were from, we got a little snicker, and sometimes a “heh… you know what that rhymes with?” My brother actually started telling people he was from “ree-JEE-na”.
Not really terribly funny then, is it. Must be some American thing as I just can’t see the amusement value.
Hey, we can’t all be Benny Hill.
I went to school with a girl whose last name was Cocke. All the teachers would pronounce it “coke”, possibly because there was a set of twins with the same spelling who pronounced it that way. And every time they did this girl would emphatically correct them “no, it’s COCK”.
On a slightly unrelated note, when I was very young and working my first office job I had to relieve the switchboard operator for breaks and someone called for one of the executives. The guy says “the last name is 'Dover ’ tells me his phone number and says"oh, and the first name is Ben”. It took me repeating it three times to the exec ,who was cracking up, before I got the joke. Apparently his buddy pulled those kinds of gags on all the new girls.
I actually know a guy named Jor-El. Both of his parents are Ultimate Nerds and actually named the poor kid after Supe’s father.
There was also a thread here two or three years ago about the legality of funny names, and somebody said their wife (I think) had a kid in her class named ‘Bagina.’ Supposedly it was also pronounced to rhyme with ‘vagina’—it wasn’t pronounced ‘BAG-EENA’ or anything like that. IIRC, the issue was that the school wouldn’t let her enroll with that name, and the parents had a hissy fit.
I don’t agree with the OP in the purest sense because versions of this do happen but this is a racial joke for the most part. A partially illiterate black woman gives birth to a child and has no name in mind and names the child the first thing she sees or hears. It could be based on the Jello next to the bed or a Urine (Yur_I_nee) container.
I believe the coach’s last name was Skinner, not Skinnerd.
It is indeed an American thing.
Picture a time and place where there is a group of people (or, now, their descendents) that were snatched from their own home and culture and brought to another. They were systematically denied the right to speak their language and keep their way of life. They were cut off from their roots. Many years later, these people have a brand new culture and way of life.
They don’t know what the refined or traditional names were in there nation or tribe or whatever. There are no Catherines or Marias or Jonathans to feel connected to.
They decide to make their own names to match their brand new culture. Some of them choose French sounding names that sound good to their ear. Some of them choose Arabic sounding names, and then alter the spelling.
Not such a bad thing, in my opinion. But of course, I’m sure it makes some people feel good to turn their noses up at them for their choices in children’s names.
Orahnjelo can sound like a frenchy sounding name, and at the same time, like jgoddess said, it is so funny to laugh at the illiterate black woman that doesn’t know that Orange Jello isn’t pronounced in an affected French accent.
Reall Not All That Bright, I read Freakonomics too, and I knew that ‘orange jello’ shit was bullshit, right at the gate.
Well, it’s not meant to be stand-up comedy. It’s an urban legend.
And I believe Female (pronounced feh-mah-lee) came from the remake of Cat People, but I could be wrong.
I knew a guy name Ben. His last name wasnt Dover. However his girlfriends name was.
He said he would be a modern man and take his girlfriends last name instead of her taking his.
And the kicker was her first name was Ilene.
So as a modern couple they woud be Ilene and Ben Dover.
I swear this a true story.
My mother works at an elementary school that has kids from many different backgrounds, economic and cultural. Because of this, she sees some pretty interesting names. The ones I remember most, though, were two brothers named Sir and Lord. Their last name was Barnes. Somewhat unfortunate, but it could be worse.
Yup. Fancy Guin, of all people, posting without doing a little elementary fact-checking.
I went to high school with a girl named Wanda Ball.
And my best friend, Jenny Weiner, ALMOST married a guy with the last name Ring.
Is she black in all the tellings? I’ve never associated the weird name UL’s with race, just stupidity.
I don’t believe the OP’s point was that no one in the world actually has a silly name. I could also name people I’ve known personally who had rather silly names. But some tales of silly names certainly do appear to be urban legends.
I’ve known several different people in different parts of the country who claimed to either have personally encountered or knew someone who’d encountered boys names “Lemonjello” and “Oranjello”. Same for “Female” – just last week one of my coworkers was claiming that when she’d been doing volunteer work at a hospital there was a barely literate couple that gave their newborn daughter that name because they saw it on her wristband*.
Either these names are actually quite common, so common that practically everyone is only 2-3 degrees of separation from knowing a “Lemonjello”, “Oranjello”, or “Female”, or these stories are often repeated by people who have never really met anyone with those names.
In the interest of research, I just checked the Social Security Death Index and could find no records for anyone with the first names “Lemonjello” or “Oranjello” or any variant spellings. People with these names would only show up in this particular database if they were dead, but I’ve also checked Ancestry.com and am getting nothing on either of these as first names. “Lemongello” is a rare but not unheard of last name and may have inspired the legend.
I got two hits in the SSDI for “Female” as a first name. One died the day she was born, so it’s likely she didn’t actually have a legal first name. Ancestry.com gives me a lot of hits on babies who died without being named and are listed as “Female [Lastname]” or “Infant Female [Lastname]”. There may be some girls out there who actually are named “Female”, but anyone who’s ever seen this name on some kind of official record or list was probably actually looking at an entry for a girl who either had not been named or whose name was unknown.
“Vagina”, “Chlamydia”, “Syphilis”, and “Shithead”/“Shithed” also produced no hits in the SSDI. I actually did turn up a few women named “Vagina” in Ancestry.com (including one Mrs. Vagina Bland), but all died before 1930. No hits on the other names in Ancestry.com.
*In my experience, hospital wristbands use “F” or “M” instead of “FEMALE” or “MALE”. I’ve still got the wristband from a recent ER visit, and it says “F”. I doubt that many hospitals would crowd the whole word “FEMALE” onto a tiny baby wristband when all medical personnel would understand what “F” meant.
Didn’t have time to edit again, but wanted to add that I don’t have a premium Ancestry.com subscription and so could not view these full records and confirm that the name really was “Vagina”. I have encountered transcription or OCR mistakes when searching genealogy databases (e.g. my great-grandfather “Forrest” was entered as “Parish”), so it may be that some of these supposed Vaginas were actually named Regina.
You missed the most common method, which is pick a regular name and add a syllable. Easiest place to observe the practice is NFL depth charts; see LaDanian, Marshawn, DeAngelo, DeShawn, Leodis, Justise, Chansi, LaMarcus, Le’Ron, Oniel, Lavernues, D’Qwell, Kamerion, Syndric, DeShea, Antuwaan, Gijon, Tiquan, Montavious, Kennard, Rashean, LenDale, Sen’Derrick, Le Kevin, Dantrell, DaJuan… all taken from current NFL rosters (and I stopped at the Chiefs).
In grade schoo,l a good friend’s name was Dick Lord (no, not Richard).