My name sounds very similar to the (unusual) name of the protagonist of a well known movie of the 80s. Yeah, I’ve heard all the jokes before. Let’s just say that anyone who brings this up has made a very poor first impression.
I go by my middle name, but my first name and last name, when read distractedly, looks like a famous singer’s. I’ve gotten a few comments, and it’s obnoxious.
I’m more annoyed by the people that insist on calling me by a diminutive when I introduce myself with my full name. Is two syllables instead of one really that much of a hassle?
I have the same name as an erstwhite famous person, but only one person has ever noticed the fact: an aging Irish Jesuit.
Jim Jones, the name of a man a knew socially some time ago, it must be a hard name to carry.
Big Jim Walker?
If my name was Choksondik, I’d change it by deed poll. You might want to think about that.
Well I wouldn’t be able to help myself. If you introduced me to William Shakespeare I would have to say, “'Tis but thy name that is my enemy.”
When I was young, I once worked for an American branch of an international company headquartered in the UK. Many of our senior executives were British, and they were all very pleasant and socially correct.
Also, one of them was a tall man with a high hairline and ears that stuck out slightly. He didn’t look a lot like Sean Connery, but if someone said, “Hey, he looks a little like Sean Connery,” it would have been understandable.
Also, he was named Bond.
James Bond.
For real.
There’s just no way, professionally speaking, that one can mention the obvious to someone who looks vaguely Connery-esque, has an English accent, (not Scottish, at least) and is named James Bond, without looking like some dimwitted American yokel.
So we didn’t. He introduced himself as Jim, and that’s what we called him.
But sometimes, after he’d taken the elevator back upstairs, I’d look at my office-mate and we’d both begin quietly humming the James Bond theme.
You know how I feel about this, but unasked for dimunitives offend me. If someone says their name is X, that’s their name! Not what you make up to be their name.
I used to work with a guy named Bart. His last name wasn’t Simpson, but he got all the inevitable joking about it. (“Bart! Why you little…,” etc.) Fortunately he was very easygoing and had a good sense of humor. It also helped that he was a Simpsons fan.
Are you a Kennedy too? My last name is Kennedy, my first initial is J. People seem oddly disappointed when they find out my middle name is Alan.
I seem to recall there was a guy in the Indianapolis phone book years ago named Bartholomew Simpson. I always wondered how he dealt with the jokes.