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Mary Chambers
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« Reply #15 on: 12:37:13, 26-07-2007 » |
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One first name which is splendidily distinctive without being absurd is Aldous.
Was anyone else ever called Aldous? Where did they get it from?
I think Aldous is a surname used as a first name. What about Hardiman Scott, if you remember him? I always wondered if they addressed him as Hardiman when he was two. |
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smittims
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« Reply #16 on: 12:49:19, 26-07-2007 » |
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Thanks,Mary,even so I don't think I've heard Aldous as a surname.
Using one's mother's maiden name as a first name seems to be an American pracstice ,which explains why there are so many American men called Brent or Booker.
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Jonathan
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« Reply #17 on: 12:55:52, 26-07-2007 » |
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You'd be surprised how many people spell my name wrong. It's not as if it's uncommon or anything! I put it down to laziness usually, espeically if I've sent someone an email and they still spell it wrong even when it says how to spell it right.   |
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Best regards,
Jonathan
*********************************************
"as the housefly of destiny collides with the windscreen of fate..."
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Mary Chambers
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« Reply #18 on: 13:51:37, 26-07-2007 » |
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Aldous definitely exists as a surname. There are quite a few references to it on Google - I searched for "Aldous surname" - and there is one in my local telephone directory. There used to be a ballerina called Lucette Aldous. Alldiss (as in John Alldiss Choir) is presumably a variant.
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Ron Dough
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« Reply #19 on: 13:57:44, 26-07-2007 » |
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In Scotland it's become such a cliché for parents (usually in the professional classes) to give their male offspring surnames as first names (Fraser, Cameron, Campbell) that Billy Connolly at one point identified them as 'the surname clan'.
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increpatio
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« Reply #20 on: 14:03:06, 26-07-2007 » |
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You'd be surprised how many people spell my name wrong. It's not as if it's uncommon or anything! I put it down to laziness usually, espeically if I've sent someone an email and they still spell it wrong even when it says how to spell it right. I think that this is *very* common for people with your name. As in: everyone else I know called Jonathan has had it happen to them a million times. |
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Ron Dough
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« Reply #21 on: 14:21:17, 26-07-2007 » |
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People become confused about the spelling of Jonathan partly because alternative spellings do exist; it's Jonath on Porritt, for example, and there's an actor named Jon othon Gill. Just thank your lucky stars you've not got a name like Siobhan - not only because it attracts so may strange variations, but also because you'd look silly with a girl's name.  |
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Tony Watson
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« Reply #22 on: 14:37:58, 26-07-2007 » |
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Some interesting names I've come across in my time:
There was a boy called Cyril who insisted it should be pronounced "Sigh-ril". Another called Jammie, who was supposed to be "Jay-me" but I think his parents couldn't spell. Aaron was popular for a while but it had to be pronounced "Arron" and never "Air-on" in all the boys I knew with that name. Then there was Claire Roff, which sounded to me like "clear off". A boy called Michelle, which I can only think of as a girl's name but his parents thought it made him sound French. I also knew a Chinese boy called Ivan Ho, but who reads such classics these days? (That wasn't his real Chinese name but Chinese students will often adopt an English name whilst over here. There was a Chinese girl called Wisely, apparently because her parents were told to choose wisely.)
Shortened forms of names seem to be out of fashion with the young. Jim, Bob, Bill and Dick are not heard much, the full versions being the norm now. As for girls, there seem to be so many Charlottes around amongst the under 25s, closely followed by Emma and Lucy.
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A
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« Reply #23 on: 14:38:41, 26-07-2007 » |
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Being a teacher I was always very grateful to my parents for giving me such an uninteresting, boring name. When the children/students discovered my name after great thought , they found it so boring that the subject was dropped!! I was at school with a girl called Florence Nightingale though !!! what were her parents thinking about!!! I hasten to add it was not the real one !!!! I always wanted a middle name though, and never had one  A |
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Well, there you are.
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Tony Watson
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« Reply #24 on: 14:42:37, 26-07-2007 » |
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I was at school with a girl called Florence Nightingale though !!! what were her parents thinking about!!!
I hasten to add it was not the real one !!!!
I never thought you were that old for a minute, A! Florence is interesting in that it was originally a man's name. I had a class last year with two famous writers in it: Henry James and Samuel Johnson. |
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Evan Johnson
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« Reply #25 on: 14:45:39, 26-07-2007 » |
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My parents attempted to offset the depressing ubiquity and utter uselessness of my last name with a given name that was quite unusual, oh, say, 26 years ago; but their efforts have since come to naught, as a quick googling of "evan johnson" will make abundantly clear.
I am neither the real estate agent, the female folk artist, the various (!) high school wrestlers, nor the fictional male lead of some romance novel called "The Edge of Town." Alas.
Not that that makes it any more likely that anyone will pronounce it correctly.
At least I'm better off than my older sister, who has an extremely common first name as well. She's getting married this fall, and while I don't know whether she'll take her fiancé's name or not it's only a notch or two better than what she's got now, ubiquity-wise.
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« Last Edit: 14:47:28, 26-07-2007 by Evan Johnson »
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martle
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« Reply #26 on: 14:51:50, 26-07-2007 » |
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Evan's welsh in origin, isn't it? Ifan?
Interstingly, a lot of the British names we think have disappeared long ago (Edna, Iris, Dorothy, Rose, Alfred, Cedric, Cyril etc.) still exist in abundance in a lot of South East Asian countries, and amongst American-Asian communities.
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Green. Always green.
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Chafing Dish
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« Reply #27 on: 14:52:55, 26-07-2007 » |
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My colleague once had a student on his class roster named "Anita Reyes"
She never showed up, even for the first day of the course, so when he called her name and there was no response, the students assumed he was complaining about his salary.
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Mary Chambers
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« Reply #28 on: 14:56:55, 26-07-2007 » |
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What a wonderful selection of names! My sons were at school with a Chinese boy called Gilbert. When I was at school there were five Jeans in my class of about 25, so I was grateful not to be a Jean. I longed - inexplicably - to be called Beryl.
Not that that makes it any more likely that anyone will pronounce it correctly.
I can only think of one way of pronouncing it - Evv-an, with an unstressed final syllable, as in the surname Evans. |
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Evan Johnson
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« Reply #29 on: 14:58:07, 26-07-2007 » |
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Evan's welsh in origin, isn't it? Ifan?
My impression, and I'm sure I will be roundly corrected if I'm wrong by various Welshmen of common names themselves, that it's the Welsh version of "John", or something similar? There is a well-known American journalist named Evan Thomas, and a novelist named Evan Hunter, but that was about it until, apparently, about five years after I was born. Now I'm everywhere. |
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