I know a guy named Word Daily.
You don’t call him Word. Or Daily. Or WD.
It’s Word Daily.
mmm
There’s a Cornelius who works at my university, in the US. I don’t know the story behind the name, but he goes by Neil.
It was common knowledge when I was growing up in Philly that the longtime (at least 50 years) owner of the A’s, Connie Mack, was actually named Cornelius McGillicuddy. For some years, his grandson, now legally named Connie Mack, was a congressman from Florida, IIRC. Of course, the original one was born in the 19th century.
I knew a Cornelia in high school, and she was called Corny, but I don’t think she like it. I just called her Cornelia. I think her parents were immigrants from someplace like the Netherlands.
[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?
Some 17th century Puritans certainly did: Praise-God Barebone for one but it may not have been that common a practice - see Hello, I’m Zeal-of-the-land Busy: Satire and Puritan Names | Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources
And I’ve found on Ancestry the rather splendidly named Mahershalalhashbaz Sturgeon. There are a handful of other Mahershalalhashbazes too.
Murgatroyd is a fairly mundane surname, and there is a long tradition of using a surname as a given name. Hence Grover, Kermit, Beckett, Carter, Cameron, even Winston. I don’t really think Cornelius or Murgatroyd are particularly weird compared to some of these Puritan names like Help-on-high or Hate-evil.
I never realised until I went there, but Rudyard Kipling was named after a lake in Staffordshire (it’s not even a real lake).
I will respectfully disagree.
I know that it’s common in the Anglosphere to bestow surnames as first names. IMO, these are very hit-and-miss. Some surnames work much better as first names than others. Some simply sound more like first names than others. This is very much YMMV, but for me, Gordon or Cameron = fine. Murgatroyd, not so much. It’s not a common surname where I come from (Toronto area). Even if it were, it sounds a name that would work better as a surname and not as a first name.
Rudyard Kipling - did he go by that in his childhood/among family? His first name was Joseph. I don’t know if he ever used that name, but it looks like his parents at least wanted to give him some options.
You also mention Grover (OK, though I associate it first and foremost with an annoying monster on Sesame Street, as I do Kermit with his frenemy, a more level headed frog). That name seems to have entered into the public consciousness through the name of Grover Cleveland, a President of the United States. That name is also his middle name. His first name was Stephen, and maybe he dropped the first name in adulthood to sound more posh? That seems to be the case with Woodrow Wilson. His first name was Thomas, and he was called Tommy in his family. In public life, though, he dropped it, and was having none of them.
There was a time when it seemed to be not uncommon for up-and-coming people to initialize their first name and go by their middle which, like you said was often a surname (high-born mom’s name?)
For example, as I mentioned in this thread about going by one’s middle name, Honest John, the sly fox in Disney’s animated feature, Pinocchio, is often called J. Worthington Foulfellow in supplementary materials. So Honest John to those with whom you want to be on personal terms, J. Worthington Foulfellow to your would-be business associates. Similarly, Dagwood Bumstead’s millionaire father in the Blondie comic, was called J. Bolling Bumstead. I strongly suspect his parents, wife, etc. called him John, Jake, Jim, or similar, not Bolling, though I could be wrong.
You’re from the city of York, right? Your username contains the Latin name for that city. “Murgatroyd” orginated in Yorkshire, maybe that’s why it’s on your radar as a common name.
By way of comparison, My favorite girls’ name is Leslie (and it has to be spelled that way). This is a nice, simple name, was not rare when I was growing up, and for whatever reason, fills me with this warm, fuzzy feeling. In the novel that I am now writing, I bestowed that name on a very pretty and bubbly female character. However, “Leslie” used to be common as a boy’s name; as well, my friend C. M. doesn’t like it as a given name. He, however, is of an (allegedly) aristocratic Scottish family and he pereceives it as a surname and not a first name. And indeed, I see where he’s coming from. In Canada, “Leslie” as a surname is mixed in with the rest of the great salad bowl that our society is. Indeed, I think I was surprised in youth to learn that Leslie Street, a major thoroughfare in Toronto, was named after George Leslie, a Scot who immigrated in 1824. Whereas in Scotland, it’s probably a more common one, the name of a Lowland clan.
Yes, but over the past 30 years or so, it gotten so common as to become the norm in much of the US. Almost ALL my current college students are named Taylor or Madison or Logan or Grant. 90% of the males, 60% of the females. Very few Daniels or Lisas.
ISTM there are three types:
- The long-established ones (century or more), like Douglas.
- The late-20th-century-established ones, like Taylor or Grant.
- Very recent ones, that were only last names until right now, like Haden.
Odd example as I think Hayden exploded in popularity in the 1990s. I think of it as one of the first last-names-as-given-names-for-both-genders in the trend.
I am surprised no one mentioned Major Major Major Major - Wikipedia
Not weird, but I found it interesting that the Indian name Sweta (or Shweta) and the Slavic name Svetlana share the same Proto-Indo-European root.
" Svetlana (Cyrillic: Светлана) is a common Orthodox Slavic …depending upon context similar if not the same as the word Shweta in Sanskrit.[1]
True. I was referring to the spelling “Haden,” a boy in my son’s sixth grade, and all I could think of was jazz bassist Charlie Haden.
Oh! Sorry, missed that. I assumed that was just a variant of Hayden.
No worries I guess it probably is. (For me, “Hayden” will always evoke mid-80s memories of smoking a doobie with a friend, taking the train down to the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan, and absorbing the Laser Zeppelin show).
Svetlana can go by Sveta (Света); I have not heard the “sh” pronunciation (among Russians, Ukrainians, etc) but who knows…
But why not “ph” as in “phat”? However I have never met anyone with that name for real.
Chevy?