[quote=“Tibby, post:457, topic:915747, full:true”]
LOL. So that’s where that expression comes from!
Back in my early teens, I was raising a caterpillar (being an amateur entomologist). As a joke, I named it “Murgatroyd” - precisely because it was about the craziest name I knew. I told the president of the entomological association of which I was a member that I had done so. He asked me whether I had gotten the name from “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” I absolutely didn’t get that reference.
I also was once given as a Christmas gift a novel called “Mostly Michael”, by Robert Kimmel Smith. It’s about a boy who receives a diary for his 11th birthday and uses it to record his life, often frustrations with his home and school life, over the next year. During the course of the year, his mother becomes pregnant with her third child. Michael’s younger sister is called Mindy, and the parents want to maintain the tradition of giving their children a name starting with “M”. At one point the father claims they’re going to name their future son “Murgatroyd” and seems to be completely serious about it. Michael voices a very negative opinion and, though the father thinks it’s a really cool name, the option is dropped (I don’t remember if in the end the mother axed it). The question of what the child would be called for short is also considered, and they can only come up with “Murgy”, which sounds horrible. At another point, the mother has her own bout of inspiration and waxes lyrical about “Mace”. Michael isn’t too pleased with this suggestion, and asks his mother what they would call him for short. She throws out “Macy” and Michael points out that that’s the name of a department store. Mother takes this to heart. Finally, the baby is named Mitchell, as I recall Mitch for short. The dad claims it’s “Mitchell M. Marder” and that the “M” stands for Murgatroyd (not clear if he was serious or not).
The thing is, something that would sound like a perfectly normal name in a different country can sound weird when rendered into English (this is pretty much common knowledge). The male equivalent, “Cornelis” seems not to be a rare name in the Netherlands. For example, the birth name of Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker, who was an illegal Dutch immigrant, was Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk.
Many years ago, I was discussing something like difficult names on another forum, and one Dutch-Canadian wrote that her name was “Titia”. You can imagine the kind of ribbing she must have gotten in a Canadian school.
I just remembered the weirdest female name I knew at the same age as I became aware of the references to “Murgatroyd” mentioned above. In the novel “Polyanna”, there is a scene where the title character is talking to another character who doesn’t care for her name, Nancy, because doesn’t think it pretty enough (she prefers flowery names like “Algernon” or “Florabelle”). Polyanna answers: “you can be glad it isn’t ‘Hephzibah.’” She adds: “Yes. Mrs. White’s name is that. Her husband calls her ‘Hep,’ and she doesn’t like it. She says when he calls out ‘Hep–Hep!’ she feels just as if the next minute he was going to yell ‘Hurrah!’ And she doesn’t like to be hurrahed at.”
This is a name from the Old Testament, which seems to have a lot of names that, while likely perfectly good names in the original Hebrew, translate badly to English (e.g., Ebeneezer, Jepthah). Am I not correct that there was a time when some Anglo-Saxon Protestants gave Old Testament names to their children because they didn’t want to give them “saints’” names from the New Testament, associating those with Catholic veneration of saints (which they considered idolatrous), and so dug deeper into the Bible, resulting in some such awkward names?