Imagine If This Were Your Name... (1 Viewer)

[Marianne]

When I was at High School there was a kid named Andrew Wheedon. One time he was disrupting Physics class and the teacher just started staring at him.

All went quiet for a minute - then the teacher said: "Wheedon . . . you should be!"

 

A store name I saw in London: "Ho Lee Phuc"

 

 

 

 

[HTAmateur]

Where I grew up in Northern Virginia, there was a guy named Harold Beaver.
 

I swear I'm not making this up, he was an OB Gynecologist - Dr. Harry Beaver

 

classic. http://www.healthgrades.com/directory_search/physician/profiles/dr-md-reports/dr-harry-beaver-md-fd3b8b34

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Originally Posted by TravisR

There was a girl in my junior high and high school whose initials were P.M.S. Wisely, she made fun of it herself which made it so that no one else could really goof on her for it.

Yeah, I went to high school with a girl who had those same initials. Of course, that was back in the late Cretaceous, before the term "p.m.s." had been coined, so she didn't have to endure the jokes back then. But we laught about it in later years, and I'm sure she was sick of hearing about it by the time her reunions rolled around. (She was two years behind me in school, and we have since lost touch.)

 

Another of my classmates were named Cockburn. And that's how she and her entire family pronounced it all the way through the time we both started high school, when they suddenly "discovered" that it should be "Co-burn", the "c" and the "k" being silent. That didn't stop her then boyfriend from yelling, during one cafeteria argument, "Cockburn you --- Well. The name says it, doesn't it."

 

I once worked a rural postal route that had a family named "Outhouse" on it. The mailman who trained me was very careful to warn me it was pronounced it "O'Toosey" Maybe they descended from a long line of Irish plumbers.
 

Another one on marriage: Dick Cavett used to tell the story (which he swears is true) of his great-aunt Edith Picton, who married a man named Ralph Appleoff - thus becoming "Edith Picton Appleoff."
 

Later,

 

Joe

 

[Mike Frezon]

Just another reason I miss Dick Cavett on the airwaves...

 

 

 

[Yee-Ming]

You can't necessarily legislate for what a name will sound like in another language.

 

But it is bizarre what parents will name their children, knowing full well what it means or sounds like in English. For instance, I had a classmate called "Slim" -- fortunately for her father, she did grow up to be. And there's a famous set of brothers here called "Atomic", "Hydrogen" and "Nuclear", IIRC all born in the late 50s or early 60s. Fortunately, they did grow up to be scientists, indeed I seem to recall Atomic might really be a nuclear physicist but I can't remember offhand.