He or they have been bandied about an awfully long time. I’m starting to wonder if they’re real. That said, if my name were Harold Beaver, I would definitely go by Harry if I became an ObGyn.
Come on, people, focus! Edie, William, Calvin, Ozzy (Osmond, Oswald, Oscar, … ), Cat, Harry, Algy, and so on are not weird names, especially if you speak English. Bring on the genuinely weird names!
Maybe my bar is set pretty high. Sunshine, Happy, Saoirse, Philo, Atlas don’t ping weirdness for me. Marijuana Pepsi is getting there, though.
Surprised no one’s mentioned Elon Musk’s latest kid’s name. Originally, it was X Æ A-12. But that ran afoul of California’s rule that all names must be alphabetic characters only, so they changed it to X Æ A-XII.
Is that weird enough for you DPRK?
As for the Abcde name, there used to be a Ab C Defghi in the (IIRC) Vancouver BC phone book. Of course, you don’t have to use your real name in the phone book. Or on Facebook, which also has a person of that name. It looks like a dead entry, though.
I’m sure I must have mentioned this in some previous thread, but when I was teaching at the University of Toronto, there was a student named Adolf Hitler. He wasn’t in any of my classes, though some of my colleagues did teach him. He was apparently a very nice young fellow from India. I assume he came from that part of the country where people tend to get named after famous leaders. (Here’s a Reuters article that discusses some famous Indians with unusual namesakes, including a Stalin, a Napoleon, and another Adolf Hitler.) His name triggered all sorts of complaints at the beginning of each school year, usually from new students who saw “Adolf Hitler” logged into the compute servers or posting on the departmental mailing lists and assumed that someone’s account had been compromised.
Oh, and I’m surprised that no one has yet mentioned Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116, the name of a Swedish child born in 1991. The Swedish authorities refused to allow registration of this name, which the parents had argued was “a pregnant, expressionistic development that we see as an artistic creation”. The parents then submitted the single-letter name A, which the authorities also refused to accept.
OK, you obviously meant Musk. No he’s not currently married, although he’s been married three times before to two different women. The mother of X is a Canadian singer who goes by the single name of Grimes. She helped come up with the name, so I probably should have mentioned her too. But she’s not nearly as well known.
And according to wikipedia, Grimes’s nickname among her friends is “c.” That’s lower-case c, as in the symbol for the speed of light. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think typical everyday names are a priority in this family.
As an additional example of an odd name, we must look to history. Specifically to the history of the Kennedy administration, where we will find National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy.
Or to the history of NASCAR, where we will find everyone’s favorite racing driver, Dick Trickle.
The man who owned our house before us had the first name Swepson. I think that counts as unusual, if not weird.
Many years ago, I there was a welder where I worked named General Lee. His first name was General. One of the engineers I worked with had the first name Major. Personally, I thought both were out of place on a Navy base.
Having what’s usually a last name as a first name isn’t super rare. Anderson Cooper, for example. Another one is Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame. IIRC, Meriwether was his mother’s maiden name. I’m sure we could find other examples.
Never met any of those military-themed kids, but I have met a ‘Royal’. Upon reflection, that didn’t seem any weirder than ‘Malik’ (a somewhat common name), just more in English.