Tell us an interesting random fact you stumbled across (Part 1)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
4029

Whenever I run across something more than once in unrelated contexts, it strikes me. It’s purely coincidence, but it feels as if the Universe is trying to tell me something.

The latest example of this is “People whose weird first name is his mother’s maiden name”.

I’ve been aware for year that one way that what were originally surnames migrate to become “first” names is by people using those surnames as middle names, often by naming their kid after a famous person or family member: [Famous Person First Name] [Famous Person Last Name] [Family Name}. I’m not sure if it was his family’s intent, but that’s the pattern for, say, Martin Luther King, or a lot of Robert Heinlein heroes, like Woodrow Wilson Smith.

in any event, if the person later gets known by a truncated name, or better known by that middle name, you get a surname repurposed as a “given” name. So I’ve seen “George Bernard Shaw” written as “Bernard Shaw” (Penguin books did this for a time)

What I’ve encountered twice in one week is the case where the person got, as a middle name, his mother’s maiden name. I’d seen this a lot with girl’s names, but wasn’t familiar with similar cases for boys. Especially when the unusual middle name ended up as a de facto first name.

The first case was from some history I’ve been researching, where a naval officer’s middle name was “Hildreth”. I wondered at the unusual middle name, then was surprised, on digging further, to learn that he used it as if it were his first name for a time. I suspect he did this precisely because it was unusual, and it set him aside from all the ensigns with commonplace first names, and made him memorable. Later in his career it migrated back to middle-name, or even middle-initial status. When I dug into his ancestry, I learned that it was his mother’s maiden name.

The second case I found was author L. Sprague De Camp. I knew that the “L” stood for “Lyon”, which I took to be some uncommon first name. Nope. It was his mother’s maiden name, and they stuck it on as his given first name. Why he abbreviated it in most of his bylines, I don’t know. But even his wife, Catherine Crook de Camp, called him “Spraguey” (I’ll bet her mother’s maiden name was “Crook”)

4030

See “McGeorge Bundy” - his great grandmother’s maiden name was “McGeorge,” his grandfather had McGeorge as a first name, and the 20th century McGeorge was named after his grandfather

4031

Speaking of the Beatles, they broke up before any of them reached the age of 30.

4032

Using an ultrasonic humidifier anywhere in your house for extended periods of time can cause your gas stove to burn with orange flames.

My wife noticed the flames looked different the other day and asked me about it–the flames weren’t the typical messy orange/yellow of a dirty burner; all burners had nice smooth even flames with orange tips.
My first searches online resulted in many hits saying “you will all die from carbon monoxide poisoning!!!11!1!”, but among all of that noise there was a Stack Overflow post discussing the interaction between the microscopic particles generated by ultrasonic humidifiers and gas flames.

Sure enough, my daughter had had a humidifier going all day long. Once she turned it off the flames returned to normal.

4033

“It’s a Black WASP thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

4034

First names that are family names are common in my husband’s mother’s family – they are old money Virginians. Then they are nicknamed something even weirder. Beauchamp (girl’s first name) was nicknamed Snuffy, for example.

4035

I know from experience that an ultrasonic humidifier used with ordinary tap water will put out lots of particulate. In our case we didn’t have a gas stove; the particles were electrostatically attracted to our old CRT television screen instead, quickly fouling it with white powder.

I also remember from high school chemistry class that when you expose certain non-flammable compounds to flame, you get interesting colors. Calcium carbonate, a common precipitate from evaporating tap water, gives a nice red-orange flame:

Presumably using an ultrasonic humidifier with distilled water, which contains very little dissolved solids, should minimize or eliminate the funky-colored gas stove flames.

4036

I was listening to Conan O’Brien’s podcast the other day. It was one of his Conan Needs a Fan episodes where he talks to a fan. The guy he was talking to lived in Iceland. He said that every generation has a different last name. The last name you’re given is your father’s first name with “son” at the end. Your children’s last name would be your first name with “son” at the end. I think females are given the “dotter” ending. Conan’s fan didn’t say anything about it but I know when doing my husband’s family tree all of the Scandinavian last names were either “son” or “dotter”.

4037

Yes and I think you can only have certain approved first names, so no one ends us as Verizon MoonUnitDottir.

4038

Hey! :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

:shushing_face:

Not that unusual… :wink:

4039

Two of my female friends kept their name when they got married and their son’s first name is their last name and their last name is their husband’s last name. In each case their last name was a reasonably common first name. One was Pierce and one was Ryan.

4040

Funny, I had just dug into this a few months ago, as I had encountered a few Icelandic women over the years whose last name ended in “dottir” and had become curious about it.

Other countries also have family names that are tightly associated with them. A lot of Armenian surnames end with “ian”:

Kim Kardashian
Kirk Kerkorian
Serj Tankian
Alex Manoogian
(also, a former neighbor with the surname Simonian)

Given that Armenia shares a border with Iran, it should come as no surprise that these sorts of family names also show up among people from Iran. I once knew an Iranian fellow with the surname Erfanian.

Georgian surnames likewise have recurring patterns.

4041

Do we have another Hildreth in our midst?

I’d never even heard the name before I started researching the topic that brought him up.

4042

I’ve lived with a couple of Armenians (whose names ended in a “-ian” sound, if spelled differently)

But not all Armenian names end that way (just as all Polish names don’t end in “-ski” or “-witz”). Karsh, the famous Canadian photographer, was of Armenian descent. And his name wasn’t shortened.

Similarly, having “-ian” isn’t infallibly a sign of Armenian ancestry. After I learned about Armenian names, it suddenly hit me that Bagratian, the Russian general who fought against Napoleon (and is a character in Tolstory’s War and Peace) must have been Armenian. Nope – he was Georgian (even though “-ian” isn’t on your list of Geortgian name endings.

And, of course, there’s Lando Kalrissian. Not to mention all of Deep Space Nine’s Kardassians.

4043

Yep, certainly not an iron-clad rule, but if one is forced to guess, that’d be where the smart money is.

Perhaps a corruption of Kardashian? Who knows what a lifetime of cosmetic surgery and gene therapy could produce…

4044

Le Pain Quotidien is a originally Belgian bread and snack chain, now a major caterer who has even made it into the USA. It means, of course, Our Daily Bread. Which is a good name for a bakery, IMO, and not at all ordinary:

I have been in the original one in the Rue Dansaert, in Brussels, without realizing it was the first one until much later.
If you look up cotidiano in the Spanish Dictionary of the Royal Academy it will simply refer to diario, implying they are perfect synonyms. And under diario you will find many meanings, including a daily newspaper.

4045

Cotton Mather comes to mind.

4046

My son’s first name isn’t that odd (think recent Super Bowl MVP), but it is traditionally a last name. He got it because it was his maternal grandfather’s middle name, which occurred because it was the grandfather’s mother’s (so, my son’s great-grandmother) maiden name.

4047

I believe it is more accurate to say that most Icelanders only have a single name. The “last names” are merely a way to distinguish people with identical names by naming a parent. At least, that’s how it was explained in a translator’s note in a novel I read by an Icelandic author.

4048

John Wilkes Booth. I would guess that not many people know who John Wilkes was.

Among Wilkes’ achievements were:

  • Being sued for seditious libel for calling King George III a liar.
  • Causing a number of riots.
  • Fighting a duel with the Secretary of the Treasury.
  • Being thrown out of the Hellfire Club (a club that existed mostly for the purpose of drunken orgies) …for being too much of a hellraiser.
  • Becoming Lord Mayor of London