There was a certain amount of tittering over a member of ?Bill Clinton’s staff called Randy Bumgardner.
And somewhere there’s a high school yearbook entry for a young lady called Ginger Minge.
-Mr & Mrs Usain Bolt just had twins. Thunder Bolt and Saint Leo Bolt.
Years ago I was visiting a Sunday School class and the topic was about someone they knew named Harry Boner. He was a police officer in Nashville (it’s easy to find him).
I guess he really sticks out.
I used to work with a guy named Hans Hof. One of our other coworkers asked him why he didn’t use the nickname Jack (she said it was a common substitute for Hans). He told her to say the entire name out loud.
I worked with another guy named John Case who named his son Justin.
Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabadoo
And it’s pronounced “phook” or “pook.”
At least, it is in the English speaking world.
I used to have an insurance agent who shared his office with another agent named Dick Cox.
There was also a “John Holmes Meat Market” in Des Moines back in the day. A kid I grew up with got in trouble for taking a picture of the sign and sending it to a porno mag, which printed it (and paid him for it, too).
Yeah, I once explained to a driver in Thailand how “Phuket” would probably be (mis)pronounced by an English speaker. He got a good laugh out of it.
Thanks to the 2004 tsunami, everyone knows how to correctly pronounce that city’s name.
Yeah, but the Thai guy didn’t know how to correctly butcher it, so I obliged.
I was looking up the bios on Wiki of some old friends/acquaintances/colleagues. One of them, a Rhodes Scholar led to his mother, whose maiden name was Edith Butt, and then to a grandmother whose maiden name was Phoebe Freake.
There is a family of ant-eating birds in South America, whose English names are Ant-wren, Ant-tanager and Ant-vireo, depending on the habits or appearance of well-known eponymous genera. I hope someone named their daughters Wren, Tanager and Vireo, so their grandchildren would have an Aunt Wren, Aunt Tanager and Aunt Vireo. There are also Ant-shrikes and Ant-thrushes, which lend themselves less well.
That’s a Vietnamese name. Pronounced “Fook.” (Although there are some ethnic Vietnamese in Laos, so he still could have come from there.)
I heard a story about a Thai restaurant opening with that name in New York City, and the city made them change the name. Possibly apocryphal.
I had a coworker who made a joke that another coworker’s last name sounded like “lesbian” (it wasn’t that close). I asked if she really wants to go there when she had her last name. Her last name is Cox.
Come to that, one of the poshest restaurants in Paris is Fouquet’s.
A romantic young man from Le Touquet
Wrote a poem to praise Madame Bouquet.
She thought it so fine
That she asked him to dine
At his choice - to which he said “Au Fouquet’s’”
In the Philippines, one of Cebu’s best known dining rooms is Tolits, very conspicuousness signed. House specialty is Bellychon, roasted pork belly.
Saw a guy on LinkedIn named Harsh Shah.
Which is how we got Iran.
The late, great mathematician Katherine Johnson had a daughter named Joylette, named after her own mother. Turns out Joylette Hylick is a respected speaker, mathematician, and author in her own right.
You can imagine how it was mispronounced over the years.