A.Word.A.Day -- AWADmail Issue 1048

With the last name of Hancock it was amusing when my first son was born in 1976 and the nurse in the newborn nursery seriously told me I should name him John in honor of the bicentennial. I saw that as perfect grounds for eventual matricide.
-Marni Hancock, Springfield, Oregon (mrh330 gmail.com)

My former husband’s name was John Hancock. When asked by a uniformed officer to sign in to a building by putting his “John Hancock” right here, he had no choice. It was only his driver’s license that got him out of that one.
-Gael Hees, Las Vegas, Nevada (gael.hees icloud.com)

My name (Brian) came from our local butcher.
No, it’s not like that. 😊
My mum, heavily pregnant with me, was walking to the shops one day and the butcher stopped to give her a ride. I guess she told him she would name me after him, and dutifully did.
-Brian Turner, Perth, Australia (brian.turner health.wa.gov.au)

Here Lies Lester Moore, Four Slugs from a 44, No Les, No More - tombstone at Boot Hill (tombstone46xy)

Photo: mlhradio

And then there’s the famous headstone:

Here lies
Lester Moore
Four slugs
From a .44
No Les, no more.

-William Kenah, Long Beach, California (kenahwm yahoo.com)

As PG Wodehouse wrote in a foreword. He was protesting vehemently when he was being christened, but his parents simply ignored him. 😉
-Jagdeesh Sardesai, Mumbai, India (jagdeesh.sardesai gmail.com)

In my early teens I met an American girl of about 7 or 8 years old, with beautiful long blonde hair, and she’d been given the name Remington, after the typewriter! Perhaps her parents had something to do with the company, but all I thought was what a horrible name for a beautiful little girl.
-Caroline Bodoczky, Budapest, Hungary (cbodoczky gmail.com)

I once met a bartender in Frederick, MD, whose name was Sterling Silver. I didn’t believe him but he showed me his driver’s license. I’d have liked to meet his parents. 😊
-Rose Aurigemma, PhD, Rockville, Maryland (aurigemr mail.nih.gov)

I was an administrative-law judge in California. When we worked in satellite offices we had no staff and had to go to the waiting room to call out the names of the parties. I had a hearing for someone named Your Majesty. I felt really foolish calling out that name.
-Carol Agate, Cambridge, Massachusetts (carolagate34 gmail.com)

Where I worked as a lab technician I had a patient named Axel Grease and he was not too surprisingly an auto mechanic!
-Debbie Pavich, Fountain Valley, California (stevepavich gmail.com)

The two most unusual names I have stumbled across: Charlemagne Palestine -- an artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Return John, the son of a man who left to serve in the Civil War and was killed in battle. These were the last words his wife had uttered upon his departure.
-Brenda J. Gannam, Brooklyn, New York (gannamconsulting earthlink.net)

My own name is unremarkable, but my favorite name on my family tree is that of my ninth great-grandmother, Thankful Woodland (1646-1749). I may just borrow it from her someday!
-Laurie Fahrner, Port Ludlow, Washington (vegan_lady mac.com)

In Oct 2021, I legally changed my name to Apollo Moonfire. My birth name was Gregory Scott Souchock. My name-change announcement is here.
-Apollo Moonfire, Seattle, Washington (cocohusk fastmail.com)

My name is Mody. In fact, it is Marilyn but I am the youngest of five kids born in five years! No one could pronounce that name so my oldest brother dubbed me Mody and it has stuck! Paired with my last name I have had many people call me Moody and laugh and laugh like I couldn’t possibly have ever heard that before.
-Mody Bossy, Victoria, Canada (mbossy gmail.com)

I lived for decades with the last name Casebeer. Imagine the fun. It means beer cheese, which is also fun. I drive for FedEx, and so see many many names. The recent standouts are Pinkepank, which is German for sword maker, and my all time favorite, Beaglehole. Seriously. English.
-Kristin Strachan, Highlands Ranch, Colorado (ourhouse37 hotmail.com)

I knew my husband was the one for me just going on his name. It was Appel (which people usually mispronounce as Apple) and mine was Pye. Together we are happy as Appel-Pye.
-Magenta Appel-Pye, Mullumbimby, Australia (magentaappelpye gmail.com)

In the 1980s I had the pleasure of introducing my Oregon friend Slim Chance to my California customer Slim Chance. Driver licenses were immediately pulled out and compared. Another of my customers (I was a letter carrier) was Jesus Christ. Still have his business card.
-Cass Martinez, Portland, Oregon (cass zzz.com)

I met a US airman who was named Flash Gordon.He had his ID card to prove it.
-Richard Matthew, Surrey, Canada (rdmatthew shaw.ca)

It wasn’t too long after getting to know my husband that I learned he is not normal and fittingly the letters in his surname Molnar prove it.
-SandRa Molnar, Victoria, Canada (trusting365 hotmail.com)

When my first child was born we named him after me, John Patrick Jr., with the intention of calling him Jack. My (then) in-laws scoffed. “You can’t call a baby Jack. That’s an adult name. Call him John now, and he can be Jack later.” Like so much of what they said, this struck me as nonsense. The typical diminutive, Johnny, is dreadful. I hate Johnny and don’t ever let anyone ever call me that, so I was damned if I was going to inflict that on my son.
I checked in with my parents who not only agreed with me, they surprised me. “That’s what happened to you,” they said. “We planned to call you Jack, but everyone said ‘You can’t call a baby Jack,’ so we called you John. By the time you got older you just were John. That’s who you were, the name stuck.” I didn’t know that, had never heard that before. It kind of leaves you wondering how your life might have been better for good or for ill if you’d had a different name. I knew that my dad, Edwin Charles Jr., had HATED being called Eddie as a kid, so that settled it. My son was and is Jack. Never been anything else. He’s in his early 40s now, a librarian, and the name suits him.
Even my former in-laws didn’t have much trouble getting used to the name,
-John Baur, Albany, Oregon (chumbucket talklikeapirate.com)

I’m Banna. My parents wanted to name me in memory of my Russian grandmother, Fania. But we were living in a small town in Ohio and they were afraid that the name was just too unusual. They didn’t want me to be teased or called Fanny, as my grandmother had been. So they kept the first initial and named me Frances. Frances Joan. My sister, then age 2, couldn’t get her baby lips around it; what came out was “Banna Doan.” My parents thought this was adorable, and proceeded to call me Banna Doan. I learned that my name was baby talk when I entered kindergarten, and I asked to be called Frances. My mother did, once. I hated it. I decided to drop the Doan and just go with Banna. At age 17, I had my name legally changed. I knew I’d never use Frances, and it was a pain in the neck to have a legal name that had nothing to do with what I considered my real name.
In my twenties, I got tired of the baby-talk story and decided I needed a quick and easy lie. I started telling anyone who asked that the name was Hungarian, the other half of my ancestry. Of course you know what happened: a woman who said, “Really? I live thirty years in Hungary, I never hear this name.” Busted. Back to the baby-talk story, which some years later cracked up an entire courtroom when the prosecutor asked my name’s origin during the voir dire. Even the defendant was laughing. Really? His name was George Washington, and he was laughing at my name?
In a graduate school course called “Language and Culture” our professor asked us to find out and share what our name meant in its original language. I told the baby-talk story, concluding with, “So my name doesn’t mean anything.” He contradicted me. “You’re wrong! This is terrific! Every few years when I teach this class I get a story like yours. What you don’t realize is this: YOU are the definition of Banna!”
-Banna Rubinow, Poughkeepsie, New York (bannarubinow gmail.com)

There are two stories to explain why my parents spelled my name with a K rather than the more common C. For polite company, it was to piss off my grandmother. But the truth is that they had a friend named Carol whose last name started with a S. She was frequently teased for having the initials C.S. You see, back in the day, people said “C.S.” rather than a particular naughty phrase (second word “sucker”). Little did my parents know - by the time I was in middle school, people had dispensed with the initials and just said the whole thing. I’m glad, though, because I love my K! Another funny story related to today’s word is that the first time I was asked to sign a check (I was seven or eight), I was so delighted to be asked for my John Henry, I wrote, “Karol the Great”.
-Karol Ruth Silverstein, West Hollywood, California (karolinas aol.com)

I’m not quite sure how “unusual” her name was, or even the spelling (it’s been close to 40 years, back some time in the mid 80s) but our local state fair would allow students free-entry and this particular year, the school bussed us over. I ended up hanging with a fellow student and we were passing through the vendors’ section when we saw a booth with wooden keyrings carved into names. My companion went up to the vendor and said, “I bet you don’t have my name.” Without missing a beat, the vendor pulled a keychain out of his pocket that read “my name” (IIRC, it didn’t have anything to represent the space between the y and n; I used a space to defeat the spell checker). She was far from the only or first person to pull that line on him. I don’t remember the spelling of her name; it was, or sounded like, Désirée.
-Jon Killian, Kent, Washington (jonkillian hotmail.com)

While I did not personally know Modern Man, he was a friend of friends. Leland Bruns (his first name) grew up in Fargo, ND. He was an interesting artist who changed his name to Lelando Bruvinski, then Lalo. I’m not sure how many iterations his name went through to finally become Modern Man. His art was controversial, funky, and just plain weird.
-Carlee O’Dell, Fargo, North Dakota (carleeo13 gmail.com)

I knew a guy who changed his name to 1069. Similar challenges.
-Verna Clark, Crosslake, Minnesota (skiqueen crosslake.net)

Back in Kakamega, Western Province in Kenya, there was a girl called Madeinusa. When grown she was curious and asked her mum what her name means and she told her that she didn’t have a name ready and during birth the midwife had a tee on with words Made In USA and she loved it, and therefore named her Madeinusa.
-Aduma Patrick, Nairobi, Kenya (ndioaduma gmail.com)

I was 17 years old when I decided to change my name. First, middle, and last. My parents were upset, I think they saw it as a rejection of them. In my mind I saw it as a first step in taking responsibility for myself. At that time (mid 1970s) it was easy to do. Sign an affidavit and it was done. Only a few official things to change. Over the years I’ve had a lot of explaining to do but I like to think I’ve grown into the name. I have three younger sisters, two also changed their names and one didn’t. Naming is powerful.
-Morning Azule Waters, Fair Oaks, California (midwive yahoo.com)

My name is Liby Thomas Johnson. I am Liby, Thomas John’s son. Till several years ago, when I was a less-known entity in my sector of work, people took me for a woman, given my first name. On two occasions, at conferences, I was assigned to share rooms with other women and there was a last minute scramble when I reached the venue and the organisers realised that I was in fact not a female Liby.
I am part of the 1970-80s generation from Kerala in the south of India whose parents had taken to fancy-sounding two-syllable names. I got away with much less in terms of the first name. There are Jucy, Lusy, Lousy, and more. I have rationalised that Liby is short for liberation.
-Liby T Johnson, Bhubaneswar, India (libytj gmail.com)

My name is Sutter. I was named after Sutter Street in San Francisco. Apparently my parents liked the name, and even if I was a boy, they were going to give me this name. But there’s more. A few years ago (after more than a few decades of finally getting used to my unusual first name), someone pointed out that Sutter means shoemaker in Austria, Southern Germany, Switzerland. My maiden name is Schumacher, German for ... you guessed it. So my parents unknowingly named me Shoemaker Shoemaker.
-Sutter Schumacher, Christchurch, New Zealand (sutteranne gmail.com)

My first name is Hindi. It is an unusual name for an American woman. However, I like it as I never have to sign my last name to a greeting card -- there aren’t many of us Hindis around. But the uniqueness of the name also gets me called Heidi, Hilda, Mindy, Cindy, and others. My formal name is Hinda -- again, not common, but less uncommon since it’s Yiddish (and, I’ve been told, also a common Muslim name).
-Hindi Greenberg, Nevada City, California (hindi.artslover gmail.com)

My stepfather’s name is Chips. The reason? His mother had the nickname “Fish”, being a former Victorian (Australia) backstroke swimming champion. So it was entirely logical, when she was pregnant, the embryo was named Chips, long before birth. And his sister, born a couple of years later? Ann.
Thus Fish Ann Chips!
-Chiara Maqueda, Mparntwe, Australia (chiara.maqueda gmail.com)

There are a number of customs for how people are given their names. These customs follow the particular culture of the persons involved. In a number of Asian cultures, first comes the clan’s name. then the individual’s given name. In the case of the Chinese, this may include a generational name, given to (usually) male descendants of the same generation. Last is the individual’s given name and this in a way reflects the parents’ hopes for their offspring.
Our first Prime minister was Mr. Lee Kuan Yew. Lee is here the clan’s name, Kuan is the generational name given to all male descendants of that generation, and Yew is his personal name.
We should respect individual customs and not blindly follow one particular method.
-Kwa Tjong-Liem, Singapore (kwatjliem gmail.com)

I love my names Mazeaud and Dominique as they both have a root or association with house/home (maison and domus), but it’s my middle names that are a bit unusual -- Gazelle Whale, names which I gave myself when I became an American citizen. They replaced my mother’s and godmother’s names Ghislaine and Anni. Since I had discovered my true mother, the Earth, it felt right to change my middle names to two of her animal emissaries which have a special meaning to me.
-Dominique Mazeaud, Santa Fe, New Mexico (heartistdm gmail.com)

Just saw 60 Minutes last night about a woman named Reality Winner A real name. A story.
-Eda Malenky, Brooklyn, New York (emalenky yahoo.com)