I was in a bookstore one, back when those existed, and a woman went to the desk and asked if they had the book she ordered.
“I’ll check, what’s your last name,” the clerk asked.
“D-U-M-A-S.”
“How’s that pronounced?” (I expected it to be ‘doomah’)
“Dumbass” she said.
I had a professor with the last name of Screws. I always thought he should have been a dentist but either way he was Dr. Screws. Mankiller is a Native American surname you still see from time to time.
I met a guy named Bizarro. That was really his name. I saw his passport.
I thought that name was only in Superman comics.
I suspect Jodorowski’s lastname would nowadays be transliterated as Fiodorowski, but in any case, when he introduces himself to other Hispanics he says “Alejandro Jodorowski, yes like the verb meaning to fuck,” (joder) “no it’s neither a joke nor an alias.”
A Spanish glossy mag ran for several months a piece on people with strange name combinations, I remember one whose full name translated to Juan Carlos King Spain.
Recently dealt with a gentleman called Merlin Brownsword at work, i shit you not.
Thread from about a year ago about some people with a very curious surname: Everybodytalksabout.
Includes a post with a link to Native American (Blackfoot) genealogy, showing page after page of those marvelous descriptive phrase names of the sort that they used.
Some that I’ve met over the years and remembered:
Rainwater
Badhand
Whitehat
Thrillkill
Proudfoot
One of my favorite Indian (South Asian) surnames is Sodawaterwala. -wala (and its spelling variants) is a type of profession-describing suffix.
I worked in a high-tech shop in Silicon Gulch which had an office in Herzliya, Israel. Not sure which of those locations was actually the corporate HQ. About 2/3 of the people at our location (that is, about 100 or so) were Jewish and/or Israeli, and many others of very diverse origins.
Some of them had very contrived sounding names, like people sometimes get when they move from one country to another and invent new names for themselves.
We had one guy, surname Gesundheit.
We had a Yomtovian. (Hebrew words meaning “Good Day”, the Hebrew idiom for holiday, with Armenian ending tacked on.)
We had two Indonesian employees, named Widjaja and Danuwidjaja. Nobody really knew how to pronounce “jaja” except everybody knew the two j’s were pronounced differently. Except my supervisor (whose was Dutch, and named Kleijnen), who claimed it was perfectly obvious to any Dutch-speaking person. (The first j was pronounced like an American English j, the second j pronounced like y.)
People had copies of The C Programming Language by K&R, in Hebrew.
Haven’t read the entire thread, but I used to live in town that had quite a few people named Tittsworth and Arrowsmith. The latter is the name of a small town in Illinois.
There are people with the surname Viox (one X) and the launch of Cialis was delayed by some time because some people named Cialis sued the drug company for a name change, which didn’t happen. :o :smack:
p.s. I once filled a prescription written by a urologist named Dr. Wiener.
The scandanavians just say they have stupid surnames because they were told to stop using the "Tor son of Jan " system… so they just chose the names they were already being called, Tor GotherBotham… Tor who lived in the bottom of the Gother valley
And anyway, the spellings just change to common words and then those words become slang or euphemism… they may become euphemism because of the names…the euphemism/slang meaning of “bottom” is reinforced by the joke… so it becomes well known … part of the language…
I’ve run across Hiscox, they sell small business insurance. I’ve seen also:
Badcock, Raper, Bringsplenty (that was a Native American name), Boring, Updick, Novaktibbet
In this context, the normally unremarkable “Dickinson” also sounds weird.
Yeah, that’s correct. That’s why there are no stupid surnames in Iceland (they retain the -sson and -dottir system).
Interestingly, the Swedish army gave its soldiers different names because with several Johnssons and Anderssons per regiment they needed something to tell them apart. Thus, soldiers ended up being called according to their physical or mental attributes (blunt, strong, tall…) or military equipment (shield, lance, sword…). Many of these surnames remain today.
Ballplayer pitcher Mark Lemongello (le-MON-ge-lo) was responsible for “Lemon Jello” jokes that persist today.
My father swore he knew a dentist named Dr. Toothaker-- yup “Tooth acher.” My father was not known to make up things like this, so I believe it.
I went to high school with a girl whose last name was “Lipscomb,” pronounced “Lip scum.” I always thought if I had that name, I’d name a point of pronouncing the “b.”
I also went to school with kids whose last name was “Morris,” and you’d think with an easy last name like that, their parents would pick OK first names, but the girl was Doris (yeah, Doris Morris), and the boy was named Mealie Mack. He went by “Mack,” but in the yearbook, it always said “Mealie Mack Morris.”
I knew two people (both Jewish, if anyone cares) named Goldman and Brunberg, who, when they got married, took the name “Sienna.” If they been Wasserman and Erdman, I guess they could have called themselves “Mudd.”
There was a town councilwoman in a central South Carolina town with the last name of Condom. Not to be confused with the former SC AG, Charlie Condon, with an “n.”
Verstrynge. Once it dawns on you, its “Verystrange” and there’s no going back.
ETA: My elementary school’s sole male teacher, rumored to be fiercly strict and unforgiving, had the last name of Kill. Finding out you were assigned to Mr. Kill’s class for the next year’s course was extremely bad news.
“Looking back on when I
was a nappy-headed little boy…”
Swackhammer. Just sounds like what you do with a hammer.
For bad combinations - in my high school there was a boy whose name was “Phillip Dick.” Being teenagers, we never failed to call him “Feel up dick.” Poor kid.
There was an old woman on a cola comparison commercial many years ago named Toppie Smellie. It was so unusual that I memorized it.
I knew a large family in Alaska with the last name Reekie, which is probably Irish in origin.
I knew a guy with the last name Lipp. Also a sailor named Sailor. Also a guy named Darling. In the military you always address somebody by their last name. His response to “Hey, Darling!” was always “Yes, Dear?” Everyone eventually just called him Paul.
I knew a Harley Fork; his parents were bikers.
I worked for a young Ensign with the last name Hjerpe (pronounced “Yerpee”). It’s Scandinavian, and of course everybody mocked it as “herpes”, har-de-har.
I had a childhood friend named Harry Crouch. Adolescence was misery for him.
Ralph Lauren’s real name is Ralph Lifshitz. Evidently it didn’t convey the image he was trying to project.
I know a person whose last name is Krakauer who was nicknamed “crack whore” for little reason other than the similarity in sound. Now I can’t not think of it when I hear the name.