I used to work with a southern yuppie who had three surnames, something like “McKay Robinson Burton”, to honor all of his various family lines. He was every bit the arrogant self-impressed provincial ass you’d expect a “McKay Robinson Burton” to be, also.
On the flip side, I worked with a girl whose family seemed to exist to validate trailer park stereotypes (she was about 20 and lived with her mother and grandmother, who were about 24 and 28 [actually her grandmother was in her early 50s]). Her own child was named Diedre Marlena after Diedre Hall, who plays Marlena on Days of Our Lives.
In the book Freakonomics there is a chapter on the importance of first names. One of his anecdotes is about a girl named Temptress who was arrested as a juvenile in Memphis recently. Her mother was a fan of the Cosby Show and named her after her favorite character, Vanessa who was played by Tempest Bledsoe (but the mother couldn’t freeze frame long enough to memorize it and had honestly never heard the word Temptress. He also has the true story of a ghetto father from the 50s who named his two youngest sons Winner and Loser. Winner was a multiple arrest convicted felon and Loser became an extremely successful lawyer.
I posted my maternal grandmother’s odd name in a thread before. We’ve never figured out where my great-grandfather got it; he swore it was in the name of a beautiful song he’d heard once. The name was Zulimer. The only similar name I’ve found is Zulima, a Hebrew name meaning ‘happy’ or something like it.
I have a cousin who gave birth to her only child when she was in her late 40s and named her “Manna”, “cause she was Manna from heaven…”. I felt kind of bad when I learned that manna was most likely bug droppings.
Women in my family had a lot of state names at one time. Georgia and Florida weren’t so bad, but there were also a Tennessee, a Carolina and three (count them, three) Louisiana’s.
Slight hijack, but if I meet one more person who swears that they know somebody who named their child “Shithead” (she-THADE), twins named Lemonjello and Orangejello, or a girl named Female [feh-MOL-ly] because “That was on her bracelet at the hospital”, I think I’m going to slug them. No… you didn’t. I clocked that one as an urban legend more than 20 years ago, the 50th time I heard it.
Forgot about this, but every day on my way to work, I drive past a house that has some kind of advertising sign in the front yard. I don’t know what kind of business they’re advertising, because the print’s too small, but the name’s obvious, and damn hysterical: Fakes & Hooker!
I met a guy once who’s legal name was Vertigo Sunshine Sixtynine.
It was on his driver’s license and everything. (And apparently at least part of it had been his parents’ idea.)
I also once met a man whose first name was Mandevil. He went by Harry. (Older guy too; I’d really like to know the history behind the name. I know he was a very religious Christian…)
Not odd exactly, but while looking at my son’s elementary school yearbook this year, I saw that he went to school with Charles Bronson, Courtney Cox and Brian Wilson.
There’s also a family with four sons; Layton, Chayton, Payton and Nathan. Ugh.
I’m usually the name-vetoer in my circle, it’s really easy for me to tap into my inner third-grader and demonstrate how the name will be made fun of. Most of us spend months deciding on baby names, so there’s time to come up with something different.
My biggest victory was probably stopping a girlfriend from naming her first daughter Bailey Bliss. C’mon, Bailey Bliss? It’s either a coffee/ice cream drink or a porn star, not a little girl, hmph.
I’ve got a few newer friends who’s kids were named before I was around to veto, no truly horrific names but a few that grate on my nerves. Taylor, Bragg and Brody are names, sure, but Taylor is also the name of our local trailer-trash city, why hang that on the kid if you’re going to live near it? Bragg? Fort Bragg? Kid’s forever reminding everyone of the second G and poor little Brody was nicknamed Grody Brody his first day in kindergarten, way to go Mom and Dad.
Another set are named Damion, Cameron, Cheyenne and Braelin. Great, you’ve got a horrible demon child, one who oughta be Native American but isn’t, and two who’s gender everyone always presumes wrong.
I love collecting names! Not so unusual anymore, but I knew a girl named Apple years ago. I also knew a girl named Y. It wasn’t short for anything, that was actually her first name. I had a male student named Jehovah, which I thought was pretty bad. In the same year (different grades though) I had both a Tequila (girl) and Whiskey (boy).
A recent birth announcement saw Beautiful MyLovely (girl), Denim DiCaprio (boy), and LilMike (I forget his middle name). I just can’t wait to mean some bigshot someday whose name is “LilMike”. LOL Oh, and a Heaven Nevaeh a few weeks before. I’ve also seen in birth announcements names like Harley Davidson and Indiana Jones (both girls!).
I went to high school with a girl who married into the name Crystal Ball. Also a guy named Richard Dick, which seems to be a fairly common combination. We have a family at church who named their kids Brooke, Brie, & Brock. Not so bad separately I guess, but taken together it’s WAY too much.
I have a relative named Alex Luther. Maybe Superman won’t be so popular when he gets older? I can’t help but call him Lex Luthor all the time. Then again his own immediate family calls him Spitter as some kind of “cute nickname” (ugh!), so maybe no one will ever know his real name.
I used to work in a grad school office and we had tons of people with names like Robert Roberts and John Johnson and so on. One day I just opened the files to see how many different guys were named William Williams and couldn’t believe it!
Well, MidnightRadio, the groundsman at Lord’s in London* is called Michael Hunt but for some unknown reason he is known as “Mick”. I just hope he doesn’t have a brother called Isaac…
*(1) Groundsman: the bloke in charge of maintaining the playing area, which is fully turfed.
(2) Lord’s: a cricket ground near Regent’s Park; also the headquarters of the Marylebone Cricket Club
Rusty Flack. Come on, that’s horrible. Also Herschel Frankenberry. Sometimes I use that as my online alias. Or Hannahlore Mahoney, she actually goes to my church.
I once had to tell my boss, “Jim, Dick Blood is on the line.” Seriously, that was his name. There was also a guy who built theater sets named Dick Archer. Why do these guys choose to go by Dick?
My great-aunt’s name is Vaninga. I have never heard that name anywhere else. My grandmother said her mother just made it up because she liked the sound. When I did a web search on it, I turned up a lot of misspelled references to Jenny Taylor.
Angernette (woman - goes by “Angie”). I can’t tell if it was a horrible choice, or a horrible misspelling. But if it’s a misspelling, what were they trying to spell???
For years the chief of police in Montgomery, AL was Chief Swindle.
My college freshman English instructor had the first name Anastasia because that was the movie her parents were watching the night she was conceived. I’m glad for her sake that they didn’t go next door to see Rainmaker, Baby Doll or Bad Seed, all of which came out at the same time.
There was also an old man who used to do work for my father whose given name (not his nickname) was Black Angus. The Black was actually a part of his name. It always seemed worthy of a Snopes.
I went to school with students who had as given names- several Bubbas, two Elvis’s, an Eisenhower, at least two Cooters and a Roy Orbison.
My great grandmother was born Louisiana Talithacumi Cotton in 1863. Another ancestor around the same time married two women named Paralee DeRamus; his first wife was the niece of his much younger second wife. (The first Paralee’s grandfather had begotten her father as a young man and then started another family as an old man, which is how she had an aunt who not only had the same name she had but was a good bit younger.)
