Different kind of urban legend, but for all of those “and the murderer was calling the babysitter from INSIDE THE HOUSE!” or “they got home and discovered A HOOK ON THE DOOR!” stories, I’ve always heard them as just being scary stories. No one’s ever tried to tell me “OH GUESS WHAT THESE ARE ALL TRUE.” Because some of them are honest-to-goodness ghost stories, and I don’t believe in ghosts.
So for those, the reason why I tell them is because they’re fun and creepy, and even if they aren’t true, they still give me the willies.
The “orangello, lemonjello” ones are stupid, though.
I did a little checking up on Lemonjello and Oranjello myself using the SSDI and Ancestry.com the last time we had a thread on this subject. My results were posted here. Although Lemongello and variant spellings are not unheard of as last names, I was unable to find any record of there ever having been a person in the US with the first name “Lemonjello”, “Lemongello”, “Oranjello”, or “Orangello”. I apparently did miss “Orangelo”, and I just confirmed that the link posted by adhemar is correct and there are indeed three people by this name listed in the SSDI. (FWIW they were born in 1895, 1911, and 1912.)
It’s possible that the real last name “Lemongello” was the grain of truth that inspired the specific Lemonjello/Oranjello legend, but there does not seem to have ever been anyone who named their child after a Jell-O dessert. It may also just be a coincidence that “Lemongello” is a real last name, as there are similar legends about pretentious but ignorant African-American parents giving their children names like “Chlamydia”. (I could find no record of any person named “Chlamydia” ever living in the US.) I have no doubt that these all originated as racist jokes about how stupid black people are, but they are repeated innocently by some people who think they’re true stories of people with wacky names.
Anyway, while I can understand repeating such a story if one finds it entertaining, I do think it’s strange that so many people outright lie about having met the twins Lemonjello and Oranjello. I mean, it’s one thing to say you’d heard of people with these names, and another to claim firsthand knowledge of their existence.
I remember hearing the urban legend about the boy fishing with baby rattlesnakes about 15 years apart from two different guys. Both told it as if it happened recently and seemed to believe it. The reason I remembered the first time is because I was young and it scared me, impressionable youth that I was. I think the scare factor’s what keeps that one around.
Since this also seems to be about unusual names now, here’s a few for you.
I taught high school biology to twin sisters Lovey and Dovey.
There was a girl at our school whose name was pronounced shuh-mare-uh, but was spelled Chimera. I guess if you make up a name for a kid, you should write it down and check a dictionary first.
Oh yeah, my mom’s had plenty of unusual names where she works. She works at an elementary school library, and this particular school is a multicultural/environmental science type school.
She told us of the two boys whose first names were Sir and Lord. Which is kinda silly and kinda badass at the same time.
People tell urban legends because they like having their prejudices confirmed. The point of the “Lemonjello” story is to imply that blacks are stupid. People hear the sorts of first names, hardly ever used among white Americans, that black Americans give their children and decide that these names don’t just show that blacks and whites in the U.S. have different cultural expectations but that blacks must be stupid to use such names. When these hear the “Lemonjello” story or any of the similar ones in which a black mother uses a word that wasn’t intended for a first name as the name for her child, they conclude that they were right and this indeed shows that blacks are stupid. If you’ll look through lots of different urban legends you’ll see that they consistently confirm some prejudice of the tellers and hearers.
Urban legends involving awful names are the only ones I might see being true, because I see 80-150 different names every day for work and there are parents that name their kids godawful stupid things. I can easily imagine someone hearing the original stories and deciding they like one of the names enough to give it to their kid.
You know the funny thing about the Female, Gonnorhea, Lemonjello etc stories is that I can remember my parents and their fellow teachers speaking of these names as kids in their school when I was in grade school as well as others that I don’t remember but along the same lines and I was told that the nurses at the Med were supplying such names to Mothers under the influance of the drugs given to them when the baby was born and that this was verified by a relative that was a nurse. This would have been 40+ years ago so these urban legends have been around a long time.
There is also a book a read where the main charcter called herself Baroness Pontalba because her mother had named her Urethra. No real point to saying this but this thread brought it to mind.
My sister married into a pretty dim-witted family. Her husband’s OK, but his brothers and sisters are some of the stupidest people I’ve ever seen. Her husband’s nephew is named “Legion”. Why? Per the parents: “It’s from the bible.”
Ummm…mighta wanted to read that passage over again before filling out the birth certificate.
I heard of a little girl named Sanella (from a swimming class), she was 8-10 years old. However, she was from an African country (Ethiopia, IIRC), so I always thought the name made sense in her native language, and that her parents had no way of knowing that in Germany, Sanella is a type of margarine.
But o noes, that limits the precious freedom of the parents! You can’t limit wonderful freedom in the US! (/sarcasm)
See, I’m not sure it’s actually as simple as outright lies.
On this other board where I occasionally post, someone whipped out the ‘child kidnapped in shopping centre, found in toilets with foreigners cutting its hair off’ urban legend, which she posted as something that had OMGjustthatweek!!! happened in a nearby town, to the child of a friend of a sister-in-law (or something like that). There was the predictable chorus of shock and horror, plus a few people asking whether she was sure, since nothing like that had been on the news and it didn’t really make that much sense to begin with. She said yes, she was absolutely positive, because she trusts her sister-in-law completely, and sister-in-law trusts her friend completely.
At this point I read the thread and posted the Snopes link.
When the poster went back to her sister-in-law, it turned out that it hadn’t actually happened to her friend, it had happened to the friend’s friend. I’m willing to bet that, if you asked friend A, she’d say no, it didn’t happen to friend B, it happened to B’s friend C. Everyone along the way drops the last link off the chain, just for ease of retelling, and all of a sudden you’ve got a billionth-hand urban legend being presented as something that’s just two degrees of separation away. No one sees it as lying: it’s just easier to say ‘My cousin’s friend’ than ‘My cousin’s friend’s friend,’ and since you know that neither the cousin nor her friend is someone who would just make this stuff up, what’s the difference?
I know this doesn’t address the original question, but it does touch on the tangential one that came up along the way. Basically, I think a lot of it is sloppiness rather than deliberate lying.
This is interesting. When I read that story, no race was given (it was just presented as happening in the US), and I assumed the Jello Brothers were either Central American or Italian, because the names sound kind of like Angelo. I thought the point of the story was that recent immigrants can easily miss cultural references and end up sounding like dorks.
Instead, I was the foreigner totally missing a cultural reference. How very meta.
Sort of. I grew up in rural Louisiana where there really are a lot of unusual black names that are just made up. I heard the Lemonjello and and Orangejello story and never claimed to know them but I did know black twins named Peaches and Pumpkin. They were really good basketball players and also boys. I don’t know if those were the names on their birth certificate but that is what they went by from early childhood.
Black mothers really did try to outdo one another with creative names back then at least so it doesn’t seem impossible for a such a thing to happen. It wasn’t completely random though. The mini-series Roots triggered black people to know in a big way that their white sounding names weren’t historically appropriate so they started making up African sounding names based on general sound patterns. That became a trend on its own and became a kind of contest to see who could take it to the most extreme levels. Look at school yearbooks from the late 1970’s - 1980’s and beyond to see this. It isn’t a phenomenon created purely through outside prejudice.
Who am I to talk though. My real name is Maverick because my mother liked the TV show.
The point of the “unusual names” urban legends is that the parent giving the baby the unusual name is not trying to be creative. The assumption in these urban legends is that the parent is so stupid and gullible that he or she believes the doctors or nurses in the hospital when they suggest a weird name for the baby just to screw with them or that they are so stupid and ignorant that when they see a word that they don’t know the meaning or pronunciation of that they will use an unusual pronunciation of it for their baby. The urban legends never consider the possibility that the parent knows perfectly well how unusual and different the name is and that he or she considers himself to be creative when he or she gives the baby the unusual name.
I’ve been told (second hand) that the unusual (by middle-class white American standards) names that black Americans often give their children are quite deliberately meant to be creative. The tradition among certain groups of black Americans is that choosing a name that sounds like something that a white American parent of 60 years ago would have chosen for a baby shows that you are kind of boring. Choosing a name that’s a little different from any other is supposed to show that you’re willing to be different and interesting. On the other hand, all the versions of the “unusual names” urban legends that I’ve ever heard make the point implicitly that the parent is at least a little dumb.