My grandpa's name was Larry. I had always assumed it was short for Lawrence. I just found out recently like 8 years after he died that it wasn't even short for that. Apparently my illiterate great grandparents wanted to name him Larrington (which I'm 90% sure isn't even a first name in the lexicon). Apparently my great grandmother wanted him to grow up to be Larrington the Lawyer. My guess is that was a name of a local law firm she had heard of something because it definitely sounds like a surname that you would hear on a law office advert, (i.e. call Larrington and Mitchell). Turns out they couldn't spell Larrington and just decided to name him Larry for short. So his fucking birth certificate has a nickname on it for a name he wasn't even born as. My mind was fucking blown hearing this.
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My dad's name was the shortened version of a longer name and he said teachers in the prestigious British high school he went to (he went on scholarship, he wasn't rich himself) continually insisted that his name must be the longer version no matter what he tried.
He was also told, "children at this school go to Oxford or Cambridge" by his headmaster when he asked for a letter of recommendation when applying to Sheffield. He got into Sheffield anyway. Eventually got a PhD. Fuck that guy.
What a coincidence. I never knew this despite my penchant for useless trivia but just yesterday at an airport I overheard some high school kids asking each other trivial pursuit questions and this was one. The next day: this post. Uncanny.
I'd tell people my middle name was "S" too if I were a boy middlenamed Sue. How do you do?!
Better kill that son-of-a-bitch who named ya that.
Just don't underestimate them... I hear they "kick like a mule" and "bite like a crocodile"
S and a dot apparently.
S and a dot is just for when you want to abbreviate the S by adding an additional character.
That was the whole pun wasn't it?
Have an old friend/colleague with the last name Oh, share the same first name, so at work we would always say, John S., John D, John O type of deal, for some reaosn it would keep me wondering if we were really saying Oh or O. For him. (John isn't really the first name, just an example)
Hairy Ass
Harry "Cool S" Truman
I had a friend like this in college. His name was AJ. That's it. Just the letters.
Everyone in the department spent ages trying to guess what it stood for. I managed to glance his ID when we got lunch together once. His name was just AJ. There weren't even periods marking it as an abbreviation.
Still haven't told anyone though
Now I want to name a kid Ay-Jay.
Did you call him Aj or A.J?
Reminds me of the character BJ in M*A*S*H. Named after his parents, Bee and Jay
That was a fun episode. I love M*A*S*H. We need a good anti-war show like that today.
Still my favorite show ever aired, and that's in a universe where Star Trek exists. But there's just something special about MASH
If you've never gotten the DVDs and never seen the European version without the laugh track, definitely watch it. It's like a different (and even better) show. You start realizing that the laugh track was being put in where it shouldn't have.
I bought the Martinis and Medicine DVD box set back in college and ripped them to my NAS many years ago. Every once in awhile I will be visiting my in-laws and catch an episode with the laugh track on television, and it's the most awkward thing ever.
It really is amazing where they put the laughs in sometimes. Something that is definitely supposed to be sardonic is taken to be a joke by the laugh track. Gelbart must not have been involved beyond his insistence that OR scenes never had a laugh track because, like you, I occasionally catch an American version on TV and it feels so wrong now.
It kind of ruined shows with laugh tracks for me. I start analyzing where the laughs are being put. Shows I really like with laugh tracks are shows I just can't watch anymore. I can do live audiences, but not laugh tracks.
It's a great litmus test for good writing. If the show with it's laugh track removed is awkward, it's bad writing. If the opposite is true, it's not a clear test, but at least it's a good indicator.
My stoner friend's incredibly, unbelievably stupid girlfriend has kids from a previous relationship named AJ, BJ, and CJ.
you have now made me suspect they are not abbreviations.
Names only an ancient roman could appreciate.
Assuming those are in sequence, sucks to be the middle kid
sucks to be the middle kid
I see what you did there.
There's also Ulysses S. Grant. The "S" was apparently just a mistake on his enrollment at West Point. His birth name was Hiram Ulysses Grant. He tried to switch his first and middle names, but ended up with the initials USG instead of UHG.
And then there's the odd case of "Thomas a Becket." Thomas Beket was never called Thomas a Becket in his lifetime. He apparently went by many names, one of which was "Beket," but never "a Becket."
https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2023/research/thomas-a-becket-study/
Homer Jay Simpson Or Homer J. Simpson
If his name is S why is there a period... like an abbreviation.
People are used to adding periods so they just add it in.
Source: My middle name is a letter.
I used to work with a guy that was from China. He only had a first in a last name. He was going to college here and the college required everyone to have a middle initial as part of their login. They just used his last initial as his middle initial.
Wait does everyone there have a middle name? I'm Dutch and I don't have a middle name. I figured that was quite common also in the English speaking world
I don’t have either. Maybe it’s a murican thing
My grandfather and father dont have a middle name.
Both Sicilian (Father born in the U.S though)
I knew that middle names are common in the US but I didn't know it's so deep in the culture
J Moore, the Moore in the wildly used Boyer-Moore string search algorithm, has a first name of a single letter, J. It's not an abbreviation.