I’ve been hearing his name a lot in regards to the auto worker’s strike, and I keep thinking we’ve veered into Irish politics.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the similarity on the networks or on Op-Ed pages, because the first few times I heard his name I was confused.
Looking on the internet I see that a lot of other people have noticed the similarity, too. Looking up Shawn Fain on Wikipedia and elsewhere doesn’t turn up anything like “his parents supported the Irish Home Party” or anything else like that. But they must have noticed.
I mean, surely Paris Hilton’s parents must’ve realized that people would at first be mistaking her for a hotel, right?
Ha, yeah, being in the suburban Detroit area, I’ve been constantly hearing his name on the local and national news, and I almost started a post about it myself.
I also wondered if perhaps his parents were Sinn Féin supporters. As you mentions, not much on Shawn Fain’s Wiki page, other than this:
He is the grandson of two UAW GM retirees.
So, if there are family ties to Sinn Féin, they must go back aways. Just a WAG, but I would think if his parents were going for a clever pun on ‘Sinn Féin’ they would have spelled his first name ‘Sean’; it’s a bit closer of a reading and more Gaelicised.
It’s like Armand Hammer. His father apparently did name him after the “Arm and Hammer” logo of the Socialist Labor Party (although at first he was said to be named after Armand Duval, a character in a Dumas novel). Years later they were said to have looked into acquiring Church and Dwight, the company that made Arm and Hammer baking soda, because he was asked about it so often.
In this case, the guy clearly WAS named after an “Arm and Hammer” – just not the one most people associated with the name.
Not quite the same thing, but this makes me wonder how common the family name “Kim” is in South Korea? I have to expect there’s an ever growing list of given names that are off-limits to any sane set of parents named “Kim”.
I suppose a wacko in the US could name his kid “John Wayne”. Expecting that most folks would think of the late actor John Wayne - Wikipedia, while Dad was thinking of the late serial killer John Wayne Gacy - Wikipedia.
Proportionally (by a factor of more than 20) more common than “Smith” in the US, though there are cultural subtleties that are probably best the subject of another thread
But Bobbitt was (in)famous for being a victim, albeit a rather deserving one. Gacy was infamous for being a very dangerous wacko. The parental insanity / negligence necessary to chose Gacy as your kid’s namesake is in a whole different league than choosing Bobbit. IMO YMMV.
Osama was a very common Arab boy’s name. There were a lot of perfectly decent boys, young men, and old men named a perfectly ordinary name on 9/10/2001. Sucked to be (many of) them starting the next day.
I’ve told this story before, but as a teen I had a job where my then 30-ish manager was named “Ronald McDonald”. Poor Ron had been about 6yo when the hamburger clown was invented and his life as an ordinary unassuming grade-school kid suddenly took a severe turn for the worse.
I see what you mean. I actually googled to see if it’s possible that J.W. Bobbitt could have been named after Gacy, not Marion Morrison; or at least that his parents were stupid to have named him that after Gacy became infamous…Bobbitt was born in '67, Gacy in '42. But Gacy’s atrocities didn’t become public until '78.
So, giving your newborn son the first and middle names ‘John Wayne’ is…
We recently had a long and ill-tempered thread about the use of “Karen” as a pejorative for “entitled whining jerkwad, possibly but not necessarily female”, and how much that was unfair to innocent folks assigned the same name by fate.
When the asshole in chief of your county’s worst nightmare enemy shares a family name with 20+% of all your own country’s citizens, that’s got lots of room for unhappy.
Yes, but the first time I heard of “the Paris Hilton scandal”, I assumed it was about something that happened in a hotel in France.
Eh, the fact that the name is SO common probably blunts it considerably. I mean, I’m sure that both Presidents Johnson had their share of detractors or even enemies, doubtless including many themselves named Johnson. And when you’ve got a fifth of an entire country with the same name, it’s not going to be used by itself to refer to any one individual.