So, back in the day when people communicated by telephone, I could tell when or where a caller knew him from by whichever of the five versions of his name they asked for.
If they asked for Mr X it was probably someone selling something.
This was the case with my Dad, as his full name was John Merrill. For some reason, he got called Mick when he had his first job, and that’s what most people, including my mother, called him, except when she was annoyed with him when it became “John Merrill”
Our neighbour called him Mel. When he started work at ICI in Pontypool, he became Jack, and when he started working at a local factory after taking early retirement, he worked with someone he worked with at ICI, so he was Jack there. He met my stepmother there, so she and my stepbrother called him Jack.
Just to add further confusion, one of our friends in St John Ambulance always called him “Nick”, not “Mick”.
I had a friend who was a prison chaplain and also served as an assistant at a parish church. He went by Fr. Bill at the church and Fr Smith at the prison. This way when he met someone who knew him on the street, and he could not place them he would know where they had met.
For several years my dad was in a care home in the next room to my vicar’s mother, E.
E was very sociable and remembered details about people, but managed to attach the wrong name to absolutely everyone except her immediate family. Dad was registered blind at that stage and his hearing wasn’t great, so it was often difficult for him to work out who was saying hello to him unless they had a particularly distinctive voice. But as E always called him Carl (not remotely related to his actual name) he was always able to tell it was E speaking to him, which he found much easier.
I was named after a Del Shannon song, not, as my uncle feared, after a formula one driver of the time. I never liked middle name #1, although lovely for other people, it has never suited me. It turned out my Dad had randomly added it at the registry office without mentioned it to my Mum. Middle name #2 was MuminElmet's maiden name, now my surname. On changing my name by deed poll aged 18, I dropped my Dad's surname and added my confirmation name, Madeleine, after St Madeleine Sophie Barat, patron saint of the education of girls, as middle name #2.
My first name is from my mom, sorta... Her name is Helen, and a friend of hers who moved to Mexico City and got married there told my mom her name in Spanish would be Elena. Mom wanted to call me that, but, she curiously reasoned (I'll explain this in a bit) that she couldn't, since we had no Spanish-speaking ancestors. So she went with the (old) French, Elaine.
My middle name comes from my mom's cousin, on whose birthday I was born.
So the reason it's curious that my mom thought she couldn't give me the Spanish version of her name: While it's admirable that so many decades ago she was unwilling to appropriate from another culture (though she wouldn't have thought of it in those terms), her family hadn't followed that tradition themselves. My mom had an aunt named Xenia (who had an aunt Xenia as well), and we have no Greek ancestry. (I'm guessing maybe the first Xenia was named for a friend of the family or something. Even weirder is that in my family, it was pronounced "Zennie." While that may have been a nickname, I never heard anyone pronounce it otherwise or spell it other than Xenia, and neither did my mom.)
Nick Tamen mentioned the custom of giving one mother's maiden name as a middle name for the eldest boy, and the other mother's to the second.
That happened in my family, but without any connection at all to the southern US. My g-grandmother's name went to my eldest uncle. My parents used it as my given name. It's an Irish surname, not all that uncommon but vanishingly rare as a given name in this country. My other great-grandmother was a Goodrich, and I'm very happy that I didn't end up with that as my given name.
My father's family had a curious habit with names. Aside from the eldest (the uncle of the middle name) nobody was called by their name. The second son, Ralph G, was called Mike. The next was Ted, not connected at all to either of his actual names, which were his father's two given names. My father was called Ned. I don't know how they managed with a Ted and a Ned in the same family. All of the girls were called by a more conventional nickname, but not by their full names.
My father had a nickname for me when I was growing up. Nobody but he ever used it, and he finally gave up when I was about 18.
My father's middle name was his mother's maiden name. My brother's middle name is our mother's maiden name, though only since he was in his teens. He changed it from a more standard name at that time.
My husband and my son share a middle name with the rest of their line--I suppose you'd call it a clan. Apparently there is a whole village of Shish-kebab Lambs in Vietnam, all closely related and distinguished from the Mint Lambs, the Roasted Lambs, ...
I get that too occasionally. WHY do people think they can just assume, instead of asking...
On that theme, though a slightly different take, one of my pet irritations is people who shorten (or lengthen) one's name without permission. I worked with someone who did this - my real name is not easily shortened, but she managed to do it, despite my repeated requests for her not to. ...
She would have a hard time if she ever migrated to Australia, where shortening of names is very common.
But I have the opposite problem. I have been called by the common abbreviation of my first name by all and sundry, including my parents, since birth. My parents gave me the longer form legally as they thought it would sound more distinguished if I was ever knighted in later life! That did not happen, but what did happen is various bureaucracies insisted over the past 20 or 30 years that I put my legal name on their forms. The result is that receptionists etc always call that name into a waiting room, often without a surname. So if no-one else responds, I assume they mean me.
This bureaucratic tendency has also been a nuisance to several of my female relatives, whose commonly used name was actually their middle name. One of them decided it was simplest to just go with the flow and told her friends and professional contacts to switch to using her first name, which we did.
As for my own middle name, it was the first name of my father's best friend.
I am often called by my middle name in Official Places eg hospitals because it is a common name here. (Or at least they recognise the Anglicised version of the local name). "Grab on to anything familiar" seems to be the motto
My maternal grandfather had a weird middle name, which we now know from family history was a surname in his family. I'm not sure that he knew the origin though.
The truly memorable bit though is what my grandmother said about it. They were engaged, and a fairly short time before the wedding (maybe a couple of weeks?), my grandfather turned up to see her and said he had to tell her something.
All sorts of thoughts ran through her mind. Was he calling the wedding off? Confessing to fooling around with another girl? Nope.
His heartfelt confession was "my middle name's not Adrian".
He'd realised that at the wedding he was going to have to give his full name and sign the register. He was sufficiently embarrassed by his middle name (which also started with A) that he normally lied and said it was Adrian. And he couldn't keep lying to his soon-to-be wife about it.
I was named after an athlete who my mother had trained with (my lack of athleticism didn’t go down too well) and given a 2nd name that kept both sides of the family happy. My sister was, apparently, named after a woman who “kept herself in fur coats and diamonds”, and also given a 2nd name that kept both sides of the family happy.
Out of curiosity, why is it that we have 2nd (and even 3rd, 4th etc) names? And is this common across all cultures?
In France, people with middle names are usually Catholic. Husband en rouge's middle names are his father's and godfather's names, which isn't unusual. (His parents have converted to Protestantism since, but were Catholic when he was born.) Double first names - Jean-Pierre, Jean-Paul, Marie-Louise and all the rest - are becoming less common than once they were, but there are still plenty of them around, especially among the bourgeoisie (whose stereotypical son is Charles-Henri).
Captain Pyjamas just has the one name, largely on account of being born three and a half months ahead of schedule. He was pretty fortunate that he got one, TBH - a lot of the tiny people in the NICU are originally registered just as "boy" or "girl", because their parents were expecting to have rather more time to settle on what they were going to be called.
My maternal grandfather had a weird middle name, which we now know from family history was a surname in his family. I'm not sure that he knew the origin though.
The truly memorable bit though is what my grandmother said about it. They were engaged, and a fairly short time before the wedding (maybe a couple of weeks?), my grandfather turned up to see her and said he had to tell her something.
All sorts of thoughts ran through her mind. Was he calling the wedding off? Confessing to fooling around with another girl? Nope.
His heartfelt confession was "my middle name's not Adrian".
He'd realised that at the wedding he was going to have to give his full name and sign the register. He was sufficiently embarrassed by his middle name (which also started with A) that he normally lied and said it was Adrian. And he couldn't keep lying to his soon-to-be wife about it.
I know of a child who was given "Athanasius" for a middle name. I suspect he'll either be terminally embarrassed or decide he has the absolute coolest name ever as a teen.
I was named after an athlete who my mother had trained with (my lack of athleticism didn’t go down too well) and given a 2nd name that kept both sides of the family happy. My sister was, apparently, named after a woman who “kept herself in fur coats and diamonds”, and also given a 2nd name that kept both sides of the family happy.
Out of curiosity, why is it that we have 2nd (and even 3rd, 4th etc) names? And is this common across all cultures?
I'm glad to have a middle name! There's another person in the US I'm aware of who has the same first and last name as mine, although I think it's her married name. We now both have PhDs, too. Our middle names should distinguish us more than they do, though. Luckily, we're in different fields - I'm in theology; she's in psychology (and has been at it a couple decades longer than me).
I imagine for people with more common first and last names, middle names might be appreciated similarly - although there are a lot of first/middle name combinations that are so common the middle name probably doesn't help.
Vietnamese women usually have a middle name that is little more than a marker that means "female." Vietnamese men of a noble background often have a clan-type marker for a middle name. There are whole countries where most people go by a single name, which doubtless screws up the computes of multi-national corporations. I still get all sorts of crap from our county tax office because our last name is two letters long and their computers insist on three minimum. Bah.
My mother was first generation German American. She and all of her siblings went by their second name as did my Grandfather. I always wondered if it was a family thing, or a German thing.
I have a very common surname, and even in our small country town, there were at least two other men with the same first and surname. We lived at the same house number and street name as one of my namesakes in separate fringe villages, so mail was often confused. My two middle initials were an important signifier in those circumstances.
Vietnamese women usually have a middle name that is little more than a marker that means "female." Vietnamese men of a noble background often have a clan-type marker for a middle name. There are whole countries where most people go by a single name, which doubtless screws up the computes of multi-national corporations. I still get all sorts of crap from our county tax office because our last name is two letters long and their computers insist on three minimum. Bah.
I knew a man who emigrated from Afghanistan from a small community. No one in his village had last names. But he did have a nickname, so when he came over to the US he added his nickname as his last name. He ended up getting a PhD and became Prof. Nickname.
One of my mother's cousins was named Middle name First Name Surname, which gave him the initials ADM. If his first name had come first on his birth certificate his initials would have been DAM and his parents wanted to avoid that.
My maternal grandfather had a weird middle name, which we now know from family history was a surname in his family. I'm not sure that he knew the origin though.
The truly memorable bit though is what my grandmother said about it. They were engaged, and a fairly short time before the wedding (maybe a couple of weeks?), my grandfather turned up to see her and said he had to tell her something.
All sorts of thoughts ran through her mind. Was he calling the wedding off? Confessing to fooling around with another girl? Nope.
His heartfelt confession was "my middle name's not Adrian".
He'd realised that at the wedding he was going to have to give his full name and sign the register. He was sufficiently embarrassed by his middle name (which also started with A) that he normally lied and said it was Adrian. And he couldn't keep lying to his soon-to-be wife about it.
I know of a child who was given "Athanasius" for a middle name. I suspect he'll either be terminally embarrassed or decide he has the absolute coolest name ever as a teen.
One of my uncles was born on 24 Aug and copped the saint of the day: Bartholomew. He was known as Bart for all his long life, long before The Simpsons
Mr & Mrs Card's son arrived on February 14th 1913, so they christened him Valentine.
Not easy to google, for obvious reasons, but you can look him up on FreeBMD, along with Zeppelina Clarke who was born in 1916, the doctor having arrived by the light of the burning Zeppelin down the road (and, intriguingly, the third child named Zeppelina!), and my personal favourite, Ophelia Fanny Hole. What on earth were her parent's thinking?
I knew a man who emigrated from Afghanistan from a small community. No one in his village had last names. But he did have a nickname, so when he came over to the US he added his nickname as his last name. He ended up getting a PhD and became Prof. Nickname.
I have a colleague with just one name. Computer systems have all kinds of problems with him - he quite often gets addressed as "Fnu" or "Fno" (First Name Unique / Only) - but he has so far resisted adopting a second name just to conform to some bureaucrat's expectations of what names should look like.
@orfeo - I used to sail dinghies as a kid, and we had two unrelated couples with identical names. They were generally referred to by the kind of boat they sailed.
There are whole countries where most people go by a single name, which doubtless screws up the computes of multi-national corporations.
We've recently been filling out all sorts of legal forms, and for the first time in our lives, one of the forms has an option for "single name." It took us a few minutes to realize that this was not the same as the old fashioned "maiden name," but was intended to cover precisely the situation you describe.
The best name form I have ever seen was one that I filled out as a shiny new undergraduate. As I recall, it asked:
1. For my full name, written out in the formal way, that I would expect to see on my degree certificate.
2a. For the part of my name that was appropriate for use with an honorific
2b. For the appropriate honorific to use.
3. For my preferred given name.
It assumed nothing about how I ordered my names, or how many names I had, or what role each of those names played - it just asked me how I wanted my name to be used in the various difference circumstances that the university would have cause to use my name.
The best name form I have ever seen was one that I filled out as a shiny new undergraduate. As I recall, it asked:
1. For my full name, written out in the formal way, that I would expect to see on my degree certificate.
2a. For the part of my name that was appropriate for use with an honorific
2b. For the appropriate honorific to use.
3. For my preferred given name.
It assumed nothing about how I ordered my names, or how many names I had, or what role each of those names played - it just asked me how I wanted my name to be used in the various difference circumstances that the university would have cause to use my name.
Mr & Mrs Card's son arrived on February 14th 1913, so they christened him Valentine.
Not easy to google, for obvious reasons, but you can look him up on FreeBMD, along with Zeppelina Clarke who was born in 1916, the doctor having arrived by the light of the burning Zeppelin down the road (and, intriguingly, the third child named Zeppelina!), and my personal favourite, Ophelia Fanny Hole. What on earth were her parent's thinking?
Little Ophelia wasn't related to Annis Hole was she? (born 1909 Morningside, became Mrs Frackleton, and was a member of the Iona Community.)
Online forms still generally seem to reject the possibility of two or more middle names or initials. I just filled in yet another yesterday where my middle name appears as Fh. A low level government flunkey (in Canada) once helpfully told me that if I didn't like their system, then I should change my name to suit the format of their identity card.
My son has two first names (one for each culture), as well as a middle name and last name. He is routinely forced by software to parse this as one first name with the second one relegated to a mere initial in the middle-name spot. The real middle name goes unmarked.
It sucks, but you have to do it the same way every freaking time or all the computers talk to each other and have a massive freaking breakdown. That, or they report to the IRS that you're actually three people (happened to Mr. Lamb, who was not so careful).
Little Ophelia wasn't related to Annis Hole was she? (born 1909 Morningside, became Mrs Frackleton, and was a member of the Iona Community.)
Unlikely, I would have thought, as Ophelia was born about half a century before in Bristol, but not impossible. Not a direct descendant, whatever, as the poor lass only made 15, apparently.
My parent's village also spawned the splendidly gynaecological Fanny Ruffle - who you *can* google as she married Alfred Barnard, the first whisky writer.
I'm named after the parish priest who married my mum and dad. I knew him when I was in primary school and he was very nice. (No, my first name is not 'Father'!)
My dad's family had a 'traditional' Irish approach to naming boys, using a small pool of names which were repeated in varying combinations through generations (every family historian's nightmare). To add to the fun, almost none were known by their first names and were usually known by diminutives. My mother drew the line at my being called Paddy and chose her own preference - but there are still plenty of 'copies' of my full name from the 1880s to the present.
Online forms still generally seem to reject the possibility of two or more middle names or initials.
I refuse to use a subset of my kids' middle names. You get all or none. If your form insists on one, you get none.
I was particularly amused by the Eagle Scout application that eldest just filled out. It asks for your full legal name, but insists that your full legal name must fit within 30 characters (including spaces and punctuation)
My son has two first names (one for each culture), as well as a middle name and last name. He is routinely forced by software to parse this as one first name with the second one relegated to a mere initial in the middle-name spot. The real middle name goes unmarked.
Software, and forms in general, tend to be very bad indeed at dealing with people who have spaces in the middle of their names. You could hyphenate, cause the software generally manages to get that right, but you shouldn't have to.
We avoid hyphenating, because it just looks weird, especially when (as in my son's case) the double first name would look really freaky (think the equivalent of something like Nghiem-John). Also because everybody would immediately start trying to call my husband (or son) by the first part of that combo, which would be correct in my son's case, but not in my husband's. Which is complicated by his tendency to accept whatever anyone chooses to call him, which is why the whole metro area now calls him by at least four different correct names, as well as a basketful of bad English -not-quite-equivalents. Makes it loads of fun when a non-Vietnamese person calls us and asks to speak to [unintelligible mumble], as I can never be sure if they really want my husband, or if they're trying to reach some random Vietnamese person who has given our telephone number to a computer as a contact number. (Yes, it happens all the time. Right now with vaccines. We are the equivalent of the one village home with a phone. Grrrrrrr)
I think I am named after this guy, traditionally. I suppose you could say Mum and Dad knew him much earlier in their lives, but never gave me the impression they were fans of his; quite the opposite, really.
It's funny how my kids (whose school is full of LeShays, Trayvons and the odd Witold) tell me that names I see as totally bog-standard - the names of all my friends (Philip x4, Rob x 2, Tony x 3, John, Matthew, Paul, Peter etc etc) are 'old people's names'. Old peoples' names are Alfred, and Albert, and Florence, and Maud, right?
Comments
This was the case with my Dad, as his full name was John Merrill. For some reason, he got called Mick when he had his first job, and that’s what most people, including my mother, called him, except when she was annoyed with him when it became “John Merrill”
Our neighbour called him Mel. When he started work at ICI in Pontypool, he became Jack, and when he started working at a local factory after taking early retirement, he worked with someone he worked with at ICI, so he was Jack there. He met my stepmother there, so she and my stepbrother called him Jack.
Just to add further confusion, one of our friends in St John Ambulance always called him “Nick”, not “Mick”.
E was very sociable and remembered details about people, but managed to attach the wrong name to absolutely everyone except her immediate family. Dad was registered blind at that stage and his hearing wasn’t great, so it was often difficult for him to work out who was saying hello to him unless they had a particularly distinctive voice. But as E always called him Carl (not remotely related to his actual name) he was always able to tell it was E speaking to him, which he found much easier.
My middle name comes from my mom's cousin, on whose birthday I was born.
So the reason it's curious that my mom thought she couldn't give me the Spanish version of her name: While it's admirable that so many decades ago she was unwilling to appropriate from another culture (though she wouldn't have thought of it in those terms), her family hadn't followed that tradition themselves. My mom had an aunt named Xenia (who had an aunt Xenia as well), and we have no Greek ancestry. (I'm guessing maybe the first Xenia was named for a friend of the family or something. Even weirder is that in my family, it was pronounced "Zennie." While that may have been a nickname, I never heard anyone pronounce it otherwise or spell it other than Xenia, and neither did my mom.)
That happened in my family, but without any connection at all to the southern US. My g-grandmother's name went to my eldest uncle. My parents used it as my given name. It's an Irish surname, not all that uncommon but vanishingly rare as a given name in this country. My other great-grandmother was a Goodrich, and I'm very happy that I didn't end up with that as my given name.
My father's family had a curious habit with names. Aside from the eldest (the uncle of the middle name) nobody was called by their name. The second son, Ralph G, was called Mike. The next was Ted, not connected at all to either of his actual names, which were his father's two given names. My father was called Ned. I don't know how they managed with a Ted and a Ned in the same family. All of the girls were called by a more conventional nickname, but not by their full names.
My father had a nickname for me when I was growing up. Nobody but he ever used it, and he finally gave up when I was about 18.
She would have a hard time if she ever migrated to Australia, where shortening of names is very common.
But I have the opposite problem. I have been called by the common abbreviation of my first name by all and sundry, including my parents, since birth. My parents gave me the longer form legally as they thought it would sound more distinguished if I was ever knighted in later life! That did not happen, but what did happen is various bureaucracies insisted over the past 20 or 30 years that I put my legal name on their forms. The result is that receptionists etc always call that name into a waiting room, often without a surname. So if no-one else responds, I assume they mean me.
This bureaucratic tendency has also been a nuisance to several of my female relatives, whose commonly used name was actually their middle name. One of them decided it was simplest to just go with the flow and told her friends and professional contacts to switch to using her first name, which we did.
As for my own middle name, it was the first name of my father's best friend.
The truly memorable bit though is what my grandmother said about it. They were engaged, and a fairly short time before the wedding (maybe a couple of weeks?), my grandfather turned up to see her and said he had to tell her something.
All sorts of thoughts ran through her mind. Was he calling the wedding off? Confessing to fooling around with another girl? Nope.
His heartfelt confession was "my middle name's not Adrian".
He'd realised that at the wedding he was going to have to give his full name and sign the register. He was sufficiently embarrassed by his middle name (which also started with A) that he normally lied and said it was Adrian. And he couldn't keep lying to his soon-to-be wife about it.
Out of curiosity, why is it that we have 2nd (and even 3rd, 4th etc) names? And is this common across all cultures?
Captain Pyjamas just has the one name, largely on account of being born three and a half months ahead of schedule. He was pretty fortunate that he got one, TBH - a lot of the tiny people in the NICU are originally registered just as "boy" or "girl", because their parents were expecting to have rather more time to settle on what they were going to be called.
I know of a child who was given "Athanasius" for a middle name. I suspect he'll either be terminally embarrassed or decide he has the absolute coolest name ever as a teen.
I'm glad to have a middle name! There's another person in the US I'm aware of who has the same first and last name as mine, although I think it's her married name. We now both have PhDs, too. Our middle names should distinguish us more than they do, though. Luckily, we're in different fields - I'm in theology; she's in psychology (and has been at it a couple decades longer than me).
I imagine for people with more common first and last names, middle names might be appreciated similarly - although there are a lot of first/middle name combinations that are so common the middle name probably doesn't help.
I wonder how many pregnant women were inspired by the boat I was named after.
I knew a man who emigrated from Afghanistan from a small community. No one in his village had last names. But he did have a nickname, so when he came over to the US he added his nickname as his last name. He ended up getting a PhD and became Prof. Nickname.
Titanic?
One of my uncles was born on 24 Aug and copped the saint of the day: Bartholomew. He was known as Bart for all his long life, long before The Simpsons
Definitely not cool in 1926!
Not easy to google, for obvious reasons, but you can look him up on FreeBMD, along with Zeppelina Clarke who was born in 1916, the doctor having arrived by the light of the burning Zeppelin down the road (and, intriguingly, the third child named Zeppelina!), and my personal favourite, Ophelia Fanny Hole. What on earth were her parent's thinking?
Physical descriptions were usually resorted to. Especially as one of the women had red hair.
I have a colleague with just one name. Computer systems have all kinds of problems with him - he quite often gets addressed as "Fnu" or "Fno" (First Name Unique / Only) - but he has so far resisted adopting a second name just to conform to some bureaucrat's expectations of what names should look like.
@orfeo - I used to sail dinghies as a kid, and we had two unrelated couples with identical names. They were generally referred to by the kind of boat they sailed.
We've recently been filling out all sorts of legal forms, and for the first time in our lives, one of the forms has an option for "single name." It took us a few minutes to realize that this was not the same as the old fashioned "maiden name," but was intended to cover precisely the situation you describe.
My sibs and I have first names only. My dad was clear that he did it to thumb his nose at bureaucrats.
1. For my full name, written out in the formal way, that I would expect to see on my degree certificate.
2a. For the part of my name that was appropriate for use with an honorific
2b. For the appropriate honorific to use.
3. For my preferred given name.
It assumed nothing about how I ordered my names, or how many names I had, or what role each of those names played - it just asked me how I wanted my name to be used in the various difference circumstances that the university would have cause to use my name.
Brilliant!
At least it wasn't Edmund Fitzgerald!
Little Ophelia wasn't related to Annis Hole was she? (born 1909 Morningside, became Mrs Frackleton, and was a member of the Iona Community.)
My son has two first names (one for each culture), as well as a middle name and last name. He is routinely forced by software to parse this as one first name with the second one relegated to a mere initial in the middle-name spot. The real middle name goes unmarked.
It sucks, but you have to do it the same way every freaking time or all the computers talk to each other and have a massive freaking breakdown. That, or they report to the IRS that you're actually three people (happened to Mr. Lamb, who was not so careful).
Unlikely, I would have thought, as Ophelia was born about half a century before in Bristol, but not impossible. Not a direct descendant, whatever, as the poor lass only made 15, apparently.
My parent's village also spawned the splendidly gynaecological Fanny Ruffle - who you *can* google as she married Alfred Barnard, the first whisky writer.
My dad's family had a 'traditional' Irish approach to naming boys, using a small pool of names which were repeated in varying combinations through generations (every family historian's nightmare). To add to the fun, almost none were known by their first names and were usually known by diminutives. My mother drew the line at my being called Paddy and chose her own preference - but there are still plenty of 'copies' of my full name from the 1880s to the present.
I refuse to use a subset of my kids' middle names. You get all or none. If your form insists on one, you get none.
I was particularly amused by the Eagle Scout application that eldest just filled out. It asks for your full legal name, but insists that your full legal name must fit within 30 characters (including spaces and punctuation)
Software, and forms in general, tend to be very bad indeed at dealing with people who have spaces in the middle of their names. You could hyphenate, cause the software generally manages to get that right, but you shouldn't have to.
It's funny how my kids (whose school is full of LeShays, Trayvons and the odd Witold) tell me that names I see as totally bog-standard - the names of all my friends (Philip x4, Rob x 2, Tony x 3, John, Matthew, Paul, Peter etc etc) are 'old people's names'. Old peoples' names are Alfred, and Albert, and Florence, and Maud, right?