Donald Turnipseed was the driver of the Ford involved in the accident that killed actor James Dean.
I’ve seen a death notice for a woman whose last name was Titman, and an article about a high-school athlete whose name was Michelle Nipple.
Our neighbor’s daughter married a man with the last name of Lusty.
My mother’s physician used to be one Dr. Klutz.
There’s a hockey player whose last name is Satan.
But that just means ‘light’ (as in color), in German.
There actually is a family name Snooks. It’s a contraction of ‘Sennocks’, which itself is a contraction of ‘Seven Oaks’. Their coat-of-arms usually has seven acorns on it.
There’s also a Dutch family variously named Versnickt, Vandersnick, or Snick van der Snick. In certain Low German dialects, the word for snail is ‘snicke’. Accordingly this family’s coat-of-arms has a diagonal bar across the shield with three snails on it.
These are both examples of ‘canting arms’, which are a pictorial representation of the name. I wonder what the arms of the Death family look like?
My Mother-In-Law had a friend called Ruth Soles. I’lll leave you to work that one out !
What about the RV dealer in Richmond, Indiana advertised on billboards throughout the state … Raper, I think.
There’s Manlove and Gay.
What about ethnic names such as Lipschitz, Buffafuoco, and Wang?
Lynch?
A common family name in Las Cruces, New Mexico is De La O, which translates into English as “of the O”.
Miroslav Satan, a left wing for the Buffalo Sabres. The name is Slovakian, and pronounced “sha-tan”.
I’d love to hear RicK Jeanneret, an enthusiastic announcer for Sabres radio broadcasts, yell “HE SOULD HIS SOUL TO GET THE GOAL!”
Regarding the names listed in the OP (which appear to have intentionally been chosen to sound bad), I once read that there used to be a concern that the devil would carry off children. Naming the kid something bad was supposed to fool the Devil into thinking that the kid’s loss wouldn’t be great, which discouraged Old Nick from grabbing them. Can someone corroborate or correct?
There is also the history of European Jews having embarrassing names forced on them by anti-Semitic kings. Examples included Goldwater (urine) and Aselkopf (ass-head). (No ‘Beavis’, apparently).
I once worked under a military officer with the last name Hoar. He was a good guy, but tough as nails, the sort you didn’t want to piss off, and I seriously wonder if his name contributed to that, ala ‘A Boy Named Sue’.
Re: the surname “Raper”, my wife has the family in her lineage. In her case if was a Cherokee family that was “assigned” a name by government census takers. I suppose the more proper “Rapist” would have been worse.
Hawk
Okay, so these aren’t surnames, but I find the arrangement of my girlfriend’s middle initials humorous. Her middle names are Frances and Naomi, named after two ancestors.
When she gave the valedictory at her highschool graduation, they announced her as “Hillary F. N. [last name].” You’d think her parents would have known better.
I always thought that Professor Drydyk, from the Carleton University in Ottawa, ON (my hometown, Awww…) had the most unfortunate last name ever.
I knew his daughter when she was in 5th grade. Poor kid. Talk about playground abuse…
OK, I’ve mentioned it before, but at my job, I’ve been collecting names. Some funny, some sad, but all are interesting.
No first names, 'coz we’ve got privacy laws, dammit!
Dickensheets
Bouymaster
Fightmaster
Clinkenbeard
Titcomb
Butzlaff
Posthumus
Gearheart
Moron
Wimpee
Craps
Pancake
Plump
Stiffend
Sillyman
Bumpass
I could go on and on - I’ve collected 122!
Heh. Funny. My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Rapes. Greek. Same problem; it was pronounced differently, though.
People who I’ve met with “interesting” last names…
Mule
Bloodgroom
Butt
Dickshit (Later changed to Dixit after they lived in the US for a cople of years.)
Rape and Raper are pretty common surnames in North Carolina. My mother, who grew up in Kentucky before moving here, wondered aloud why on earth anyone named Charlie Raper Jonas would not just run as “Charlie Jonas.” Some of the natives set her straight — there were a lot of Rapes and Rapers out there.
(And his name obviously didn’t hurt him. He served in Congress from 1953 - 1973.)
A former boss used to have an obituary taped to the side of his filing cabinet. He told me that it wasn’t anyone he was related to, but the name was so funny that he just had to clip it out of the paper.
The dead woman’s name was Edna May Swallow Cox.
A guy in my high school class had the last name of Outhouse.
Many of the Tennessee Valley Authority dams, as well as Union Station in Cincinnati, were designed by an up-and-coming architect of the 1930s by the name of Roland Wank.
don’t forget the nantucket “starbuck’s” and “coffin’s”. both nifty last names.