Watching Spanish TV, my sister saw a reference to Sr. Loaf.
The Indians you refer to, have first names but no last names or family name. About 20 years back, when I went to college in the US - such people were renamed as FNU (First Name Unknown) by the INS / Social Security Office.
So a guy, from India, having an only name as Swami - will be renamed as FNU Swami.
This reminds me of a line from The Wire: I put the b in subtle.
The name of the band is Talking Heads.
My friends and I jocularly referred to him as “Mr. Loaf” back in the late 80s, as well. I’m figuring we’re about the 50,000th music fans who came about that joke. (FWIW, Google Books shows me a reference to “Mr. Loaf” as far back as 1979 without scanning beyond the first few hits. While I can’t read the full excerpt, I can see the snippet it shows me also shows a review for the Kinks Low Budget, which fits the 1979 timeline.)
NY Times obit of Miss (Candy) Barr, née Juanita Dale Slusher: link
It’s wookiee, not wookie.
A friend of mine says her younger sister ran into this problem while trying to get her license, so she wrote in the middle name field that she has no middle name. The DMV then produced a license that gave her name as Sarah Has No Middle Name Benson…
Another name that probably gets goobered up more than most: Siouxsie Sioux.
If you don’t know who that is, don’t mess with it. (She’s an English woman who took that name before cultural appropriation was thought to be uncool.)
I do wonder if such things have changed. My U.S. passport has First name and Last name. There’s no field for a middle name.
So my first name is my original first name, my original middle name and my original last name. And my last name is my current last name, which I picked up when I got married.
First name: First Middle Maiden
Last name: Married
Seems to work fine at my company. The main point is the short name. People with short last names get some strange combinations with their first names, and then some get numbers as well.
Because its name was “the Ukraine.” Why do we attach “the” to “Philippines”? Because that’s its name.
My understanding at the time it happened was that the “the” was dropped because subordinate areas get articles but independent nations don’t. My friends in the Netherlands thought that was nuts, and I’m guessing that Filipinos did, too.
And as Hatchie pointed out, Ukrainians themselves didn’t change anything because Ukrainian doesn’t have articles.
For all these reasons (plus orneriness), I still call it “the Ukraine.” No one has ever corrected me.
While we’re on the subject, the big airline headquartered in Atlanta spells the name of their company “Delta Air Lines”. Not “Airlines”. It is kind of an old fashioned way of spelling it, but I think it’s kind of cool that they still spell it that way. IIRC Eastern used the old timey two word spelling when they were in business, too.
Is he a supervillain?
Wrong. I now correct you.
No, but he doesn’t use enough comments in his code.
That’s clearly untrue because
It’s also clear you have been corrected, as you couldn’t assert you were being ornery unless you had been informed at some point that “the Ukraine” was wrong.
The actual answer is that the article was how Russians spoke about the country when speaking English. This was because it was seen as a region, like “the South” or “the West.” When Ukraine became its own sovereign country, it insisted that the correct English translation did not include the article, putting it in line with nearly every other country.
“The Ukraine” was never the country’s name. It was just a subtle way for Russia to indicate the country belonged to them. That is the reason Ukraine rejects it.
The hypen is a small strand of web holding the words together.
Apparently, the name that goes on your passport depends on the name on the ID you provide. My husband has no middle name, so his passport and ID do not have a middle name. When I got my driver’s license 40 years ago, it had my middle initial - and so does my passport which I got less than ten years ago. My son got his license about ten years ago - and it has his full middle name (not by his choice) and so does his passport.
My kids are dual Japanese citizens. People don’t have middle names in Japan, so when we received their passports and other docs, we were amused to see that their legal Japanese given name was determined by just smushing their American first and middle names together.
Similarly, the Long Island Rail Road, not Railroad.