My daughter has two gerbils, named Magical Trevor and Norman Stanley Fletcher (I am well aware of the references)
Many years ago, we bought a couple of goldfish which she named Five and Six .People just assumed there had been four now-deceased previous goldfish (there hadn’t). There was also a water snail in the tank which she named Mister Booby.
Finally, she had an imaginary friend - a small invisible giraffe that lived down the plug hole in the bath, named Chunther.
Real names (dull story):
I work in IT - part of my team’s function is to respond to requests for new user accounts. we’ve just reached the stage here in England where a big rash of kids with surnames-as-firstnames has reached adulthood and entered the job market.
Unfortunately, the process that feeds user information to us assumes the distinction between first and surname will be obvious, but it just isn’t any more.
So we invariably have to keep querying whether it’s Mackenzie Burton or Burton Mackenzie.
If we’re going for unusual pet names, I got to name the fish in the fish tank. Originally, we had a bunch of fish who have either committed suicide or got old and died. However, they (and the ones that surivived-- most of them) had some pretty silly names. We had:
Lord Buttpluggington’s Tuffy Rumblebutt III
Chocolate Jesus
Aloysius Pendergast
Bartleby
Hoover/Bissel (a pair of plecos?)
The Von Pinschenfingers (a “family” of crawfish)
I haven’t kept up with naming the others, but my names have gotten a little more normal as time went on. I generally keep the rule that, if I have to mention the name out loud on a regular basis (kids, furry pets, etc.), I can’t name it something goofy/embarrassing to say.
[sub]I’m sorry if this doesn’t make sense or has spelling errors. I’ve got bronchitis and am on hydrocodone-based cough syrup at the moment. What a weird feeling…[/sub]
In the commercial for it the announcer gives it’s name and then says, “That’s right, AcipHex”, in a tone of voice that makes you think the next line will be, “Want to make something of it?”
My SO operates a preschool for about 60 students. I don’t think more than five or so have names I recognize as traditional. My favorite is an infant named Maximus.
Just today, I got a business email from someone in Thailand whos first name is:
Watchareeporn
The way my MS Outlook is setup, all I could see in the “From” field was the first name. I came very close to deleting it without reading, figuring it was spam.
I’ve always had a perverse sense of humor when it came to naming things (except my kids). For example, we have two almost identical large stuffed bears in our house. The main difference between the two is that one is white and the other is brown. So I named them Chocolate and Vanilla – except that I purposely named the brown one Vanilla.
When we came home with our latest hamster, the kids each had a name for him, but my name was the one that one out because I put a sign on his cage with the name. The hamster’s name? Gargantua.
It’s not an inherently weird name, but I just learned that a new student in my grad program has the exact same name as one of the characters in the Harry Potter books. I am wayyyy too amused.
The weirdest legitimate name I ever heard (as opposed to character names or contrived show business names) has to be Admiral Cloudesley Shovell (1650-1707)
