Archive for Names
I’ve known maybe six or eight other people named Jed in my life, but all of them have been (as far as I know) male. Today I learned that Jed can also be a woman’s name. In 1993, a John le Carré novel called The Night Manager included a woman named Jed—a nickname for Jemima. […]
Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos is a book, published around 1825, containing a paragraph for each letter of the alphabet; each entry adds something new at the start and then repeats everything that came before. The book described itself as a game, in which players were to quickly read entries aloud, without stumbling. Some of the entries included long […]
The fake name you give a service worker in a noisy establishment.
Latest in the annals of nonprofits making odd UI choices in their donation forms: The nonprofit I’m about to donate to has a name-suffix field. I got curious and looked at it. Here are the values provided in the dropdown menu: Jr. Sr. II III IV V VI VII CPA DDS ED.D Esq. J.D. J.D. […]
Turns out that although I mentioned garden-path sentences once here in passing, I’ve never really written about them. A garden-path sentence is one that initially leads the reader to parse it in one way, but turns out to be structured differently than it appeared to be. The usual example, and the first example I encountered, […]
I feel like in science fiction lately, there’s been an occasional tendency (though with many exceptions) for authors to adopt the style of Iain M. Banks in naming their fictional spaceships. Before Banks came along, I feel like fictional spaceship names tended to be one or two words (of course, many of these names were […]
Way back in column n, I linked to my uncle Dobe Doinat’s Punny Names archive. That particular page that I linked to is gone, but Dobe has more recently created the Punny Name Archive (NSFW), a wiki that currently lists about 200 names. If you like names like Alice Well, Justin Case, or Robin Banks, […]
According to the BBC: King Mswati III of Swaziland announced on Wednesday that he was renaming the country "the Kingdom of eSwatini". […] The new name, eSwatini, means "land of the Swazis". The change was unexpected, but King Mswati has been referring to Swaziland for years as eSwatini. I think there are all sorts of […]
A recent xkcd strip introduced the game of name dominoes (see also large version of image). I’m a little surprised to see that I haven’t posted before about making chains of names; I’ve been doing it now and then for a long time. But usually I only get linear chains of three or four names […]
A bunch of interesting assorted notes about Irish names. (Published in 2016.) (Link via Marguerite.) Example: A few hundred years ago people paid little attention to how names were spelled. One extreme example is on a tombstone in Ireland where the surname for a family of six is shown as McEneaney, McAneany, McAneny, McEnaney, McEneany—and […]