He’s cool and wants to use a variant of his given name. It’s important to instruct your teacher on these things right away. Both CIDU Bill and I understand this, having gone through it every year.
It’s “funny” because a young kangaroo is called a joey. So, it’s like every child in the class is named “Child.”
SBill, this always took second place to instructing them how to pronounce “Bickel.”
Like “pickle”?
I have a very common Anglo-Saxon last name, so there was never any problem with that.
When an American turns 65, he can have this battle all over again (but unwinnably). I have always used my middle name (think J. Edgar Hoover), but Social Security, and therefore Medicare, and therefore insurance companies are locked into the old first-name-middle-initial thing. Doctors’ office automata, therefore, do likewise. Do they call for Ed Hoover? No, they call for John. So, after two-thirds of a century, one has to start answering to a different name. Grrr.
It’s the chorus of “oooo” that puzzles me.
You would think so, SBill.
But no.
It rhymes with “What the hell.”
When my younger son was in high school, he finally gave up and officially changed the pronunciation of his surname to rhyme with “pickle.”
@ Bill – The nerd (hat, glasses, spots that resemble acne) is making an anarchist attempt to appear more “grown up”, the “oooo” reaction from the rest of the class is awed admiration.
P.S. @ Boise Ed – My dad went all the way from birth to the end of high school being called by his middle name (at home) and an amusing nickname (everywhere else). When he registered for the Navy, someone introduced him using his real first name, and that “stuck”, so that since then, he’s been called by his first name by everyone (except his siblings, who still use his middle name).
Hey Bill. Are there three syllables in your last name or just two? If it’s two, where’s the stress?
I always assumed it rhymed with pickle too. I have no reason to want to know this, but as it’s been brought up, I’m curious now.
@CIDUBill: So you pronounce it pretty much the same as Theodore Bikel, just with an extra C? (I was going to say that might be a geezer reference, then realized he’d been on Star Trek: The Next Generation, then realized that was 30 years ago. So maybe it is.)
One of my great-uncles legally changed his name to reflect his family nickname. And my grandfather on the other side was known for most of his life as Bill, because he was as stubborn as a mule on the family farm that was called that. (And I’ve only just now connected that to “We named the dog Indiana.”)
There was an historical meeting of Protestant Reformers where all 6 of the participants had the name John. I picture something like a New Yorker cartoon: “Hello, John, I’m John. This is John, John, John, and you know John.”
(think J. Edgar Hoover)
On the television version of “Bosch” (I haven’t gotten into the novels), his partner is named Jerry Edgar, but for most of the time in the early seasons is addressed as “J. Edgar” which we are supposed to understand as a kind of sideswipe at Hoover.
Second Bruce Goodday, Bruce!
First Bruce Oh, Hello Bruce!
Third Bruce How are yer Bruce?
First Bruce Bit crook, Bruce.
Second Bruce Where’s Bruce?
First Bruce He’s not here, Bruce.
Third Bruce Blimey, s’hot in here, Bruce.
First Bruce S’hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum!
Second Bruce That’s a strange expression, Bruce.
First Bruce Well Bruce, I heard the Prime Minister use it. S’hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum in ‘ere, your Majesty,’ he said and she smiled quietly to herself.
Third Bruce She’s a good Sheila, Bruce and not at all stuck up.
Second Bruce Ah, here comes the Bossfella now! – how are you, Bruce?
Enter fourth Bruce with English person, Michael
Fourth Bruce Goodday, Bruce, Hello Bruce, how are you, Bruce? Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce a chap from pommie land… who’ll be joining us this year here in the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolamaloo.
All Goodday.
Fourth Bruce Michael Baldwin – this is Bruce. Michael Baldwin – this is Bruce. Michael Baldwin – this is Bruce.
First Bruce Is your name not Bruce, then?
Michael No, it’s Michael.
Second Bruce That’s going to cause a little confusion.
Third Bruce Mind if we call you ‘Bruce’ to keep it clear?
My origami mentor’s ex-wife(!) changed their last name pronunciation of Shall, like “hall” to be like “AL”. He moved away, so I wonder which he uses now.
As I switched successfully to using my middle name 25 years ago because I felt I needed a jump-start for change, I do so relate to the doctor’s offices all using the driver’s license first name to address you. I dropped even pronouncing my first name until now, but you call to be identified on the phone and be verified and, well, you are somebody that irks you to have to say, but you zone out and get used to it or it rolls off your lips less irritatingly as the years roll along.
But my dentist is my cousin’s son, so there, at least, I’m Bill.
I wasn’t escaping anything and I had a normal first name, John, btw.
This is John, John, John, and you know John.
On the John Krasinski Soome Good News clip posted here recently, one of the students featured was named John, and his wish-to-meet was Jon Stewart. So they got the three of them on screen and after some intros with all that repetition, they said “We could go on tour as The Three Johns”.
During my time in Asia, I found many people did not know “Bill” was a short form of “William”. That’s fine, English is a foreign language and I didn’t understand everything they did with names. But when I returned to Canada, I got a bit of a shock.
After a dozen years in Asia, I returned to the land of my birth and since then I have found a significant number of people who haven’t a clue that “Bill” is short for “William”. They tend more to be younger people. This bit of “common knowledge” is just becoming less and less common. And when they ask me how you get “Bill” out of “William” and I explain and then tell them that “Ted” is a short form for “Edward” or “Peggy” is a variant of “Margaret”, it’s just too much for them.
Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think we are crossing a point now of historical impropriety of addressing a stranger by their first name, ie: all those to whom that mattered have pretty much died out now.
I mention this because of the discussion of what name people use shouldn’t, in olden times, have made any difference in doctor’s appointments and official government offices, because they should all have been addressing people as Mr. so-and-so (and it would get even more tetchy for women: is it OK to us Ms., or does that offend you, and is that offense worse than my getting the Miss/Mrs. wrong?)
I became particularly sensitive to that as my father declined and all the nursing staff and such would address him by his first name, which, when he was still in command of his full powers, would leave him bristling. I saw how much of a further insult it is to proud people who have lived their lives expecting certain decorum to now be subject to this, what they would perceive as, lack of respect in their final declining years as they became more and more helpless to do anything about it. I always thought it should have been emphasized in training, that using their first names for certain people would be less comforting to them, less intimate, less trust building, than addressing them properly by their title (Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc.)
I think that now the younger end of the older generation is if anything the opposite — Mr. so and so is my father! — but there are still nonagenarians alive who would probably prefer being addressed formally…
@SBill: yeah, explain to me how “Jack” is a short form of “John”…
@larK: probably works the same way it does in “Jennings goes to school” (Anthony Buckeridge): one of the schoolboys’ nickname was Bod, by a tortuous logic involving his initials: CAT (Charles A Temple), was changed to DOG, then amended to ‘Dogsbody’, which was finally shortened to ‘Bod’.
@SBill: the subdivision I live in has a bunch of ponds, one of which is Sarah’s Pond and another is Sally’s Pond. Since they were allegedly named by the farmer who originally owned the land, either he named two of them after the same kid or he had two daughters named basically the same thing. It’s bothered me for thirty years.
(OK, I just this minute thought of a third possibility: wife was Sarah, daughter was named after her but CALLED Sally. That actually might be the most plausible explanation!)
@CIDU Bill: I’d suggest “rhymes with ‘Raquel'” might be clearer than ‘What the hell’, since the latter made me want to pronounce it ‘butt-the-hell’. Just sayin’.
My wife has a similar problem: when we got married, she took my middle name and my last name as her new last name, to avoid all the other Smiths with her first name (there were three others at our small bank). SSA and therefore DMV cannot seem to handle multi-word last names. Which must irritate all the Dutch folks, van der Thisandthat, among others.
As someone in the computing biz, this kind of thing appalls me. Every day.
[Jack], the commonest pet-name for John, has caused a good deal of difficulty owing to the natural assumption that it must be derived from the French Jacques and should therefore logically represent James rather than John. The problem was cleared up by E. W. B. Nicholson in a little book entitled The Pedigree of Jack and of Various Allied Names (1892). He showed that there is no recorded instance of Jack, Jak, Jacke, or Jakke ever being used to represent Jacques or James, and that no statement in favor of the French connexion has been produced from any early writer. He then proceeded to elucidate and illustrate with examples the development of Johannes [the standard Latin nominative form] to Jehan [the standard Old and Middle French oblique form] and Jan [the standard Middle Dutch form], whence, by addition of the common suffix -kin [a uniquely English suffix], we get Jankin, which as a result of French nasalization becomes Jackin [this is the same nasalization that gets us Harry from Henry], and was finally shortened to Jack. There was a similar development from Jon to Jock (the Scottish form of the name).
@larK: John to Jack went something like this (from memory):
Johnkin was a diminutive/”cute” version of John
Over time, Johnkin developed an alternate pronunciation of Jackin
Jackin was shortened to Jack
Isn’t ‘Guy’ also a nickname for William? In French, ‘Guy’ (pronounced ‘Ghee’) is short for ‘Guillaume’ which is the French for ‘William’.
And “Double-U Double-U Double-U” is “short” for “World Wide Web”…
During my time in Asia, I found many people did not know “Bill” was a short form of “William”.
I learned this the hard way last month when a customer service representative (Indian, I think) refused to believe that “Bill Bickel” and “William Bickel” were the same person.
Pronounced the same as Theodore Bikel?
Re: William -> Bill, Edward -> Ted.
To be fair, I found this pretty weird when I first learned about this as a kid. How often do we change or add new letters at the start of a word when “abbreviating” it.
@Chak: lol. Guy is not short for Guillaume. It’s from German Wido = forest (Guido in Italian, Vitus in Latin).
You remind me of my uncle Luc who was indignant when anybody suggested it was short for Lucien. 😀
@ShadZ: I’d go through Dutch: John = Jan > Jankin > Jank > Jack.
Okay, a tough one, but well documented: Can you trace how Spanish “Diego” is considered same as English “James”?
“Jack” has basically become a name in its own right. There have been other diminutives that went through that, for instance “Sally” (for “Sarah”) and “Molly” (for “Mary”).
Not only “pronounced the same,” jajizi, but related. His part of the family got around the “nobody pronounces our name right” issue by changing the spelling.
When my wife was in the hospital 40 years ago, we met up with a nurse who was related to both me and Theodore, except HER lot changed the spelling to Bickell.
Phil. you’d be surprised surprised at how many people think “Raquel” is the same as “Rachel,” only with a different middle.
Not just “pretty much the same”…
Speaking of going by nicknames… my wife’s aunt and uncle both went by names totally unrelated to their given names all their lives. When they were about to get married, they both had “Your real name is WHAT???” moments.
To be fair, both of their given names were pretty awful.
@CIDU Bill wrote: Phil. you’d be surprised surprised at how many people think “Raquel” is the same as “Rachel,” only with a different middle.
Color me very surprised surprised. Even surprised surprised surprised. By now I should know better, I guess. So…”RAY-kel”?? I guess it’s been a while since every straight American male knew who Raquel Welch was.
“To be fair, both of their given names were pretty awful.”
I know of an Australain friend of a friend who divorced her husband but kept his last name because her original name was “Rambsottom.”
Heck. Try that agani. “Ramsbottom.”
And “Australian” — and “again.” And now I’m going to bed.
O.K., “to bed” — I was just trolling you with that one.
Yeah, Phil, she’s now a Geezer reference.
Reminds me of when Rowling had to subtly instruct the ignorant Americans on how to pronounce Hermione; many were pronouncing it like the three words “her me own”. We geezers didn’t need the instructions because we grew up knowing of Hermione Gingold.
@ Arthur – Rowling has been very imperious with her linguistic prejudices. If she didn’t want pronounced confusion, she should have picked a more transatlantic name. I’m just surprised she didn’t object that the German translator changed the name to “Hermine”; she certainly did object when the American translator tried to convert all the “Mum”s to “Mom”s.
@ Shurg – I did notice (and was very amused by) “agani”, but I completely missed “Australain”.
@Arthur: but ubergeezers know about Lafayette’s ship.
Yes, somehow “Jack” is John, but “Jacques” is actually… James.
@Mitch4: maybe San Diego > Santiago & Iago = James ?
Phil Smith III – I use my first name, middle initial, maiden last name, husband’s last name for legal purposes.
Social Security had my name changed to same and my Medicare is in that name (which drives Walmart pharmacy employee crazy since Robert and I used to have the same last name – his – on earlier medical insurance. No problem with the double last name with Social Security or Medicare.
Why do I use all this for my name? Well shortly after we were married before I did anything about my name, I was in Macys and the woman ahead of me had a problem – her credit card was in one name and her license was in the other name and it was a problem using her credit card when they asked for ID. So I went to a double last name to prevent that problem and planned to finish switching to his last name a few years down when the first set of name changes was in the past and settled off. I was working with my dad who liked that I had a different last name from him – makes the business sound bigger and Robert and I had started our hand crafted business and he liked that I had a different last name than him as it made our business sound bigger so I did not rush to finish the changeover. In the ensuing 40 years I just never got around to the second change.
When I was in high school the assistant principal called me Merle. At graduation we wrote our names on a card and handed it to him to read. I wrote it out phonetically for him – still came out Merle. (Meh – rill). Closest thing I had to a nickname version of my name was “Meh” by younger sisters.
Robert is Robert – not Bob, not Rob, not Bobby, not Robby. With two exceptions – his dad called him Rob and his paternal grandmother called him Robby.
When I heard about his sister before I knew about his name thing I said “how cute Bob and Barbara” “No it is ROBERT!” He got over that error of mine.
My grandmother Sarah was called Virginia. In high school she was a play and played a character name Virginia.
(If Robert wasn’t rushing me to do the dishes and go to sleep, I would not have ended up with 3 posts,sorry.)
Well, here’s case where a name change DIDN’T matter:
My wife’s maiden name was Becker. When we went on our honeymoon trip to Paris, it didn’t occur to any of us that the tickets both said Bickel, while her passport said Becker.
Apparently every time the ticket and passport were checked, they figured “Eh, close enough.”
This was 1979. Can you imagine if that happened now? Best case scenario we’d have spent our honeymoon at JFK International Airport. Worst case scenario, Gitmo.
One more nickname story:
Before our son Zachary was born, my wife was adamant: NO DIMINUTIVES. He’ll be called Zachary, never Zack/Zak/Zach. She made me promise. She passed the word around to family and friends. I’m surprised it wasn’t added to the birth announcement.
Within a week after he was born, she was calling him Zack-a-Doodle, sometimes shortening it to just Doodle. Or variations on “Doodle” that I don’t want to think about.
Twenty-seven years later, she’s still doing it.
When he started school, I made her promise never to call him any of those things in the presence of his friends.
As for how James is related to all those other forms that have been mentioned, the all come from the Biblical name we think of as Jacob. In Greek it was Iakobos, in Latin Iacobus and later Jacobus. Then the Italians started writing it as Giacopo. Somehow that came to be pronounced and then written as Giacomo. In English, that eventually evolved into James.
Thanks, Olivier and DemetriosX!
The part of this that I always have trouble with (don’t see the similarities) is the “last mile” connecting the Jakob / Iago forms to James — your mention of Giacomo helps!
The part that I always like is the rebracketing that Olivier refers to. Just as “an orange” or “an apron” come from mis-identifying the initial n- of “napron” and “norange” [compare modern Spanish “naranja”], in the development of Diego there was a rebracketing in the opposite direction, with that initial dental-alveolar D- having been “peeled off” as it were from the end of “Sant'”.
There’s another way to answer the question of “How do we know Diego and James are equivalent?” which is not quite a trick-question but does take seeing it a different way. Without tracing the history or the steps, just point to (early) translations of a common ancient text into those modern languages, where the name comes up for a “character” who matches. This would generally be done with the Christian books of the New Testament — the three “synoptic Gospels” and the Acts all name apparently two different disciples James. (However, this may give “Santiago”and not fully modern “Diego”.)
@Kilby: re my
And “Australian” — and “again.” And now I’m going to bed.
O.K., “to bed” — I was just trolling you with that one.
I had intended the second sentence to read: And now I’m going to bde.
Unfortunately, in my sleepy condition I accidentally spelled “bed” correctly and thus incorrectly, destroying the intended, if admittedly feeble, joke.
Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but since we’re on the topic of names and talking about married names and changing names, here goes.
I am of white European extraction (with the pasty skin to prove it). Mrs.SingaporeBill is ethnic Chinese. In Canada, my homeland, it is still fairly common (and used to be overwhelmingly common) that the wife would adopt the surname of the husband. So, for the sake of example, if my surname were “Jones”, the expectation of many is that, after marriage, my spouse would be Mrs.SingaporeBill Jones.
In Chinese culture, it is not the case that the wife takes the husband’s surname. I don’t say last name because the traditional order in Chinese is surname followed by personal name. My wife, like many in the region, also has an English personal name that precedes her surname. So, for example, if my wife’s surname before marriage was “Lim” (common among Chinese in Southeast Asia) her full name is EnglishPersonalName Lim ChinesePersonalName. After marriage it would be unchanged.
HOWEVER (and this is the odd part), she would be referred to as “Madame Jones” when people talked about her because she would be the matriarch of our household. So “Madame Jones” would be like a title but not her legal name. All forms, passports, bank accounts, etc., would still be EnglishPersonalName Lim ChinesePersonalName.
Needless to say, few organizations have name fields that correctly and properly allow her full name to be recorded and used. So, she usually goes by EnglishPersonalName Lim in daily life.
I knew a Jewish kid in college who was named “Israel” by his parents, at least as far as his official Jewish name went, but they didn’t want people calling him “Izzy” so they gave him the name “Elliot” as his legal name. Apparently the risk of people calling him “Elly” did not occur to them.
And there’s more of a problem with “Elly” than with “Izzy”?
I guess I was familiar with there being a celebrity comedian called Shelley Berman, that I didn’t notice until much later that Shelley and Shelly are way more often female names.
Mitch, Shelly (for a man) is just the common nickname for Sheldon. Two of my father’s friends were called Shelly.
As a baseball-card-collecting kid, I was always amused by the “girls’ names” sported by Nellie Fox and Minnie Minoso.
Mrs. Shrug’s first name, in the shortened form she informally goes by, is gender-ambigious, but the spelling she prefers is more frequently used by males than females, so she tends to get a lot of cold calls and chairty pleas and such addressed to “Mr. —“)
Once before when something like this tangent came up, I mentioned two famous men first-named Lynn. One was the football player Lynn Swann. The other, I’m sorry to now have to call the late Lynn Harrell, an internationally-known cellist, from the Chicago area, who died a couple weeks ago, age 76. He was a fun and gracious guest on the local classical radio WFMT, putting together a playlist and chatting with the broadcasters.
Here is a link to his performance in the Dvořák concerto, unfortunately not video of the performance. https://youtu.be/FVWeEa0QG8E
Bill: there was also the great drummer Shelly Manne.
I have, surprise, a Jewish last name as my maiden name (We’ll use Cohen for discussion). Due to husband’s family name having been anglicized when his paternal grandfather became a US Citizen (with the removal of ini from the end of the surname) he has a “English” sounding surname (making no sense as there is no Smithini) we will use Smith for his surname because if I have to type “surname”, “maiden name” over and over I will go messuggah.
I started using Meryl A. Cohen Smith after we got married, intending to later change it just Smith something which has never happened. I currently am – depending on what and where my name is being used – Meryl A. Cohen, Meryl A. Smith, or Meryl A. Cohen Smith and even sometimes, to deal with the whims of computer software, Meryl A.Cohen-Smith or Meryl A. CohenSmith. Sometimes the initial A is there and sometimes it is not. (in the 18th century to make life even more fun I am Anne Everyman (pronounced Everah mon).
When I was applying for a passport it was the mid 1970s. We were concerned about plane hijackings – to put it simply – where Jewish people were being sorted out. So I went with Meryl A.Smith. My driver’s license is Cohen-Smith, M (actual name is a bit longer and there was no room for Meryl on license or many credit cards). I have only used my passport to go on 2 trips to Canada after all these years and sometimes for second ID in odd situations.
I have never had a problem with this.
Until IRS decided that all tax preparers should take an exam to be licensed to prepare returns. I am not a CPA, attorney or enrolled agent so I had to take the exam. The exams were to be given at a third party company that is in the business of giving job related exams. My name on my ID had to exactly match the name on my professional’s account with IRS. But that was Meryl Cohen Smith. Neither my driver’s license or passport matched. It took me so long to find out what to do and to do it (easy – duh! change the name on my IRS professional account) that the mandate to take the test was ruled illegal. But since I did not take that test,every year I have to take classes from a private company (at my cost of course) instead.
Why not change to his name right away when we got married? The woman ahead of me in line at Macys had done that – on her license and not her credit card – she could not show matching ID as she was in the middle of changing. So I changed to the double name intending “when everything evened off” after the change to then change to “Smith” but never had a chance to do so – because 40 years passed like 2 months.
Oh, and the A in Meryl A may or may not refer to my middle name – it is also his real surname initial. I have never been sure which name I intended it to be.
Comics I Don't Understand 
He’s cool and wants to use a variant of his given name. It’s important to instruct your teacher on these things right away. Both CIDU Bill and I understand this, having gone through it every year.
It’s “funny” because a young kangaroo is called a joey. So, it’s like every child in the class is named “Child.”
SBill, this always took second place to instructing them how to pronounce “Bickel.”
Like “pickle”?
I have a very common Anglo-Saxon last name, so there was never any problem with that.
When an American turns 65, he can have this battle all over again (but unwinnably). I have always used my middle name (think J. Edgar Hoover), but Social Security, and therefore Medicare, and therefore insurance companies are locked into the old first-name-middle-initial thing. Doctors’ office automata, therefore, do likewise. Do they call for Ed Hoover? No, they call for John. So, after two-thirds of a century, one has to start answering to a different name. Grrr.
It’s the chorus of “oooo” that puzzles me.
You would think so, SBill.
But no.
It rhymes with “What the hell.”
When my younger son was in high school, he finally gave up and officially changed the pronunciation of his surname to rhyme with “pickle.”
@ Bill – The nerd (hat, glasses, spots that resemble acne) is making an anarchist attempt to appear more “grown up”, the “oooo” reaction from the rest of the class is awed admiration.
P.S. @ Boise Ed – My dad went all the way from birth to the end of high school being called by his middle name (at home) and an amusing nickname (everywhere else). When he registered for the Navy, someone introduced him using his real first name, and that “stuck”, so that since then, he’s been called by his first name by everyone (except his siblings, who still use his middle name).
Hey Bill. Are there three syllables in your last name or just two? If it’s two, where’s the stress?
I always assumed it rhymed with pickle too. I have no reason to want to know this, but as it’s been brought up, I’m curious now.
@CIDUBill: So you pronounce it pretty much the same as Theodore Bikel, just with an extra C? (I was going to say that might be a geezer reference, then realized he’d been on Star Trek: The Next Generation, then realized that was 30 years ago. So maybe it is.)
One of my great-uncles legally changed his name to reflect his family nickname. And my grandfather on the other side was known for most of his life as Bill, because he was as stubborn as a mule on the family farm that was called that. (And I’ve only just now connected that to “We named the dog Indiana.”)
There was an historical meeting of Protestant Reformers where all 6 of the participants had the name John. I picture something like a New Yorker cartoon: “Hello, John, I’m John. This is John, John, John, and you know John.”
(think J. Edgar Hoover)
On the television version of “Bosch” (I haven’t gotten into the novels), his partner is named Jerry Edgar, but for most of the time in the early seasons is addressed as “J. Edgar” which we are supposed to understand as a kind of sideswipe at Hoover.
Is it “Bick – KELL?”
Apparently a common Australian problem:
http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode22.htm#2
Second Bruce Goodday, Bruce!
First Bruce Oh, Hello Bruce!
Third Bruce How are yer Bruce?
First Bruce Bit crook, Bruce.
Second Bruce Where’s Bruce?
First Bruce He’s not here, Bruce.
Third Bruce Blimey, s’hot in here, Bruce.
First Bruce S’hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum!
Second Bruce That’s a strange expression, Bruce.
First Bruce Well Bruce, I heard the Prime Minister use it. S’hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum in ‘ere, your Majesty,’ he said and she smiled quietly to herself.
Third Bruce She’s a good Sheila, Bruce and not at all stuck up.
Second Bruce Ah, here comes the Bossfella now! – how are you, Bruce?
Enter fourth Bruce with English person, Michael
Fourth Bruce Goodday, Bruce, Hello Bruce, how are you, Bruce? Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce a chap from pommie land… who’ll be joining us this year here in the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolamaloo.
All Goodday.
Fourth Bruce Michael Baldwin – this is Bruce. Michael Baldwin – this is Bruce. Michael Baldwin – this is Bruce.
First Bruce Is your name not Bruce, then?
Michael No, it’s Michael.
Second Bruce That’s going to cause a little confusion.
Third Bruce Mind if we call you ‘Bruce’ to keep it clear?
My origami mentor’s ex-wife(!) changed their last name pronunciation of Shall, like “hall” to be like “AL”. He moved away, so I wonder which he uses now.
As I switched successfully to using my middle name 25 years ago because I felt I needed a jump-start for change, I do so relate to the doctor’s offices all using the driver’s license first name to address you. I dropped even pronouncing my first name until now, but you call to be identified on the phone and be verified and, well, you are somebody that irks you to have to say, but you zone out and get used to it or it rolls off your lips less irritatingly as the years roll along.
But my dentist is my cousin’s son, so there, at least, I’m Bill.
I wasn’t escaping anything and I had a normal first name, John, btw.
This is John, John, John, and you know John.
On the John Krasinski Soome Good News clip posted here recently, one of the students featured was named John, and his wish-to-meet was Jon Stewart. So they got the three of them on screen and after some intros with all that repetition, they said “We could go on tour as The Three Johns”.
During my time in Asia, I found many people did not know “Bill” was a short form of “William”. That’s fine, English is a foreign language and I didn’t understand everything they did with names. But when I returned to Canada, I got a bit of a shock.
After a dozen years in Asia, I returned to the land of my birth and since then I have found a significant number of people who haven’t a clue that “Bill” is short for “William”. They tend more to be younger people. This bit of “common knowledge” is just becoming less and less common. And when they ask me how you get “Bill” out of “William” and I explain and then tell them that “Ted” is a short form for “Edward” or “Peggy” is a variant of “Margaret”, it’s just too much for them.
Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think we are crossing a point now of historical impropriety of addressing a stranger by their first name, ie: all those to whom that mattered have pretty much died out now.
I mention this because of the discussion of what name people use shouldn’t, in olden times, have made any difference in doctor’s appointments and official government offices, because they should all have been addressing people as Mr. so-and-so (and it would get even more tetchy for women: is it OK to us Ms., or does that offend you, and is that offense worse than my getting the Miss/Mrs. wrong?)
I became particularly sensitive to that as my father declined and all the nursing staff and such would address him by his first name, which, when he was still in command of his full powers, would leave him bristling. I saw how much of a further insult it is to proud people who have lived their lives expecting certain decorum to now be subject to this, what they would perceive as, lack of respect in their final declining years as they became more and more helpless to do anything about it. I always thought it should have been emphasized in training, that using their first names for certain people would be less comforting to them, less intimate, less trust building, than addressing them properly by their title (Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc.)
I think that now the younger end of the older generation is if anything the opposite — Mr. so and so is my father! — but there are still nonagenarians alive who would probably prefer being addressed formally…
@SBill: yeah, explain to me how “Jack” is a short form of “John”…
@larK: probably works the same way it does in “Jennings goes to school” (Anthony Buckeridge): one of the schoolboys’ nickname was Bod, by a tortuous logic involving his initials: CAT (Charles A Temple), was changed to DOG, then amended to ‘Dogsbody’, which was finally shortened to ‘Bod’.
@SBill: the subdivision I live in has a bunch of ponds, one of which is Sarah’s Pond and another is Sally’s Pond. Since they were allegedly named by the farmer who originally owned the land, either he named two of them after the same kid or he had two daughters named basically the same thing. It’s bothered me for thirty years.
(OK, I just this minute thought of a third possibility: wife was Sarah, daughter was named after her but CALLED Sally. That actually might be the most plausible explanation!)
@CIDU Bill: I’d suggest “rhymes with ‘Raquel'” might be clearer than ‘What the hell’, since the latter made me want to pronounce it ‘butt-the-hell’. Just sayin’.
My wife has a similar problem: when we got married, she took my middle name and my last name as her new last name, to avoid all the other Smiths with her first name (there were three others at our small bank). SSA and therefore DMV cannot seem to handle multi-word last names. Which must irritate all the Dutch folks, van der Thisandthat, among others.
As someone in the computing biz, this kind of thing appalls me. Every day.
larK: https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/why-is-jack-a-nickname-of-john/
Or to cut and paste:
[Jack], the commonest pet-name for John, has caused a good deal of difficulty owing to the natural assumption that it must be derived from the French Jacques and should therefore logically represent James rather than John. The problem was cleared up by E. W. B. Nicholson in a little book entitled The Pedigree of Jack and of Various Allied Names (1892). He showed that there is no recorded instance of Jack, Jak, Jacke, or Jakke ever being used to represent Jacques or James, and that no statement in favor of the French connexion has been produced from any early writer. He then proceeded to elucidate and illustrate with examples the development of Johannes [the standard Latin nominative form] to Jehan [the standard Old and Middle French oblique form] and Jan [the standard Middle Dutch form], whence, by addition of the common suffix -kin [a uniquely English suffix], we get Jankin, which as a result of French nasalization becomes Jackin [this is the same nasalization that gets us Harry from Henry], and was finally shortened to Jack. There was a similar development from Jon to Jock (the Scottish form of the name).
@larK: John to Jack went something like this (from memory):
Johnkin was a diminutive/”cute” version of John
Over time, Johnkin developed an alternate pronunciation of Jackin
Jackin was shortened to Jack
Isn’t ‘Guy’ also a nickname for William? In French, ‘Guy’ (pronounced ‘Ghee’) is short for ‘Guillaume’ which is the French for ‘William’.
And “Double-U Double-U Double-U” is “short” for “World Wide Web”…
During my time in Asia, I found many people did not know “Bill” was a short form of “William”.
I learned this the hard way last month when a customer service representative (Indian, I think) refused to believe that “Bill Bickel” and “William Bickel” were the same person.
Pronounced the same as Theodore Bikel?
Re: William -> Bill, Edward -> Ted.
To be fair, I found this pretty weird when I first learned about this as a kid. How often do we change or add new letters at the start of a word when “abbreviating” it.
@Chak: lol. Guy is not short for Guillaume. It’s from German Wido = forest (Guido in Italian, Vitus in Latin).
You remind me of my uncle Luc who was indignant when anybody suggested it was short for Lucien. 😀
@ShadZ: I’d go through Dutch: John = Jan > Jankin > Jank > Jack.
Okay, a tough one, but well documented: Can you trace how Spanish “Diego” is considered same as English “James”?
“Jack” has basically become a name in its own right. There have been other diminutives that went through that, for instance “Sally” (for “Sarah”) and “Molly” (for “Mary”).
Not only “pronounced the same,” jajizi, but related. His part of the family got around the “nobody pronounces our name right” issue by changing the spelling.
When my wife was in the hospital 40 years ago, we met up with a nurse who was related to both me and Theodore, except HER lot changed the spelling to Bickell.
Phil. you’d be surprised surprised at how many people think “Raquel” is the same as “Rachel,” only with a different middle.
Not just “pretty much the same”…
Speaking of going by nicknames… my wife’s aunt and uncle both went by names totally unrelated to their given names all their lives. When they were about to get married, they both had “Your real name is WHAT???” moments.
To be fair, both of their given names were pretty awful.
@CIDU Bill wrote: Phil. you’d be surprised surprised at how many people think “Raquel” is the same as “Rachel,” only with a different middle.
Color me very surprised surprised. Even surprised surprised surprised. By now I should know better, I guess. So…”RAY-kel”?? I guess it’s been a while since every straight American male knew who Raquel Welch was.
“To be fair, both of their given names were pretty awful.”
I know of an Australain friend of a friend who divorced her husband but kept his last name because her original name was “Rambsottom.”
Heck. Try that agani. “Ramsbottom.”
And “Australian” — and “again.” And now I’m going to bed.
O.K., “to bed” — I was just trolling you with that one.
Yeah, Phil, she’s now a Geezer reference.
Reminds me of when Rowling had to subtly instruct the ignorant Americans on how to pronounce Hermione; many were pronouncing it like the three words “her me own”. We geezers didn’t need the instructions because we grew up knowing of Hermione Gingold.
@ Arthur – Rowling has been very imperious with her linguistic prejudices. If she didn’t want pronounced confusion, she should have picked a more transatlantic name. I’m just surprised she didn’t object that the German translator changed the name to “Hermine”; she certainly did object when the American translator tried to convert all the “Mum”s to “Mom”s.
@ Shurg – I did notice (and was very amused by) “agani”, but I completely missed “Australain”.
@Arthur: but ubergeezers know about Lafayette’s ship.
Yes, somehow “Jack” is John, but “Jacques” is actually… James.
@Mitch4: maybe San Diego > Santiago & Iago = James ?
Phil Smith III – I use my first name, middle initial, maiden last name, husband’s last name for legal purposes.
Social Security had my name changed to same and my Medicare is in that name (which drives Walmart pharmacy employee crazy since Robert and I used to have the same last name – his – on earlier medical insurance. No problem with the double last name with Social Security or Medicare.
Why do I use all this for my name? Well shortly after we were married before I did anything about my name, I was in Macys and the woman ahead of me had a problem – her credit card was in one name and her license was in the other name and it was a problem using her credit card when they asked for ID. So I went to a double last name to prevent that problem and planned to finish switching to his last name a few years down when the first set of name changes was in the past and settled off. I was working with my dad who liked that I had a different last name from him – makes the business sound bigger and Robert and I had started our hand crafted business and he liked that I had a different last name than him as it made our business sound bigger so I did not rush to finish the changeover. In the ensuing 40 years I just never got around to the second change.
When I was in high school the assistant principal called me Merle. At graduation we wrote our names on a card and handed it to him to read. I wrote it out phonetically for him – still came out Merle. (Meh – rill). Closest thing I had to a nickname version of my name was “Meh” by younger sisters.
Robert is Robert – not Bob, not Rob, not Bobby, not Robby. With two exceptions – his dad called him Rob and his paternal grandmother called him Robby.
When I heard about his sister before I knew about his name thing I said “how cute Bob and Barbara” “No it is ROBERT!” He got over that error of mine.
My grandmother Sarah was called Virginia. In high school she was a play and played a character name Virginia.
(If Robert wasn’t rushing me to do the dishes and go to sleep, I would not have ended up with 3 posts,sorry.)
Well, here’s case where a name change DIDN’T matter:
My wife’s maiden name was Becker. When we went on our honeymoon trip to Paris, it didn’t occur to any of us that the tickets both said Bickel, while her passport said Becker.
Apparently every time the ticket and passport were checked, they figured “Eh, close enough.”
This was 1979. Can you imagine if that happened now? Best case scenario we’d have spent our honeymoon at JFK International Airport. Worst case scenario, Gitmo.
One more nickname story:
Before our son Zachary was born, my wife was adamant: NO DIMINUTIVES. He’ll be called Zachary, never Zack/Zak/Zach. She made me promise. She passed the word around to family and friends. I’m surprised it wasn’t added to the birth announcement.
Within a week after he was born, she was calling him Zack-a-Doodle, sometimes shortening it to just Doodle. Or variations on “Doodle” that I don’t want to think about.
Twenty-seven years later, she’s still doing it.
When he started school, I made her promise never to call him any of those things in the presence of his friends.
As for how James is related to all those other forms that have been mentioned, the all come from the Biblical name we think of as Jacob. In Greek it was Iakobos, in Latin Iacobus and later Jacobus. Then the Italians started writing it as Giacopo. Somehow that came to be pronounced and then written as Giacomo. In English, that eventually evolved into James.
Thanks, Olivier and DemetriosX!
The part of this that I always have trouble with (don’t see the similarities) is the “last mile” connecting the Jakob / Iago forms to James — your mention of Giacomo helps!
The part that I always like is the rebracketing that Olivier refers to. Just as “an orange” or “an apron” come from mis-identifying the initial n- of “napron” and “norange” [compare modern Spanish “naranja”], in the development of Diego there was a rebracketing in the opposite direction, with that initial dental-alveolar D- having been “peeled off” as it were from the end of “Sant'”.
There’s another way to answer the question of “How do we know Diego and James are equivalent?” which is not quite a trick-question but does take seeing it a different way. Without tracing the history or the steps, just point to (early) translations of a common ancient text into those modern languages, where the name comes up for a “character” who matches. This would generally be done with the Christian books of the New Testament — the three “synoptic Gospels” and the Acts all name apparently two different disciples James. (However, this may give “Santiago”and not fully modern “Diego”.)
Thus, at http://thegospelinspanish.com/read.php?book=GIS&chap=14 [and scroll down to “NAMES IN THE SCRIPTURES (Los nombres en las escrituras)”] they list
Jacob… Jacobo
James… Santiago, (Jacobo)
@Kilby: re my
And “Australian” — and “again.” And now I’m going to bed.
O.K., “to bed” — I was just trolling you with that one.
I had intended the second sentence to read: And now I’m going to bde.
Unfortunately, in my sleepy condition I accidentally spelled “bed” correctly and thus incorrectly, destroying the intended, if admittedly feeble, joke.
Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but since we’re on the topic of names and talking about married names and changing names, here goes.
I am of white European extraction (with the pasty skin to prove it). Mrs.SingaporeBill is ethnic Chinese. In Canada, my homeland, it is still fairly common (and used to be overwhelmingly common) that the wife would adopt the surname of the husband. So, for the sake of example, if my surname were “Jones”, the expectation of many is that, after marriage, my spouse would be Mrs.SingaporeBill Jones.
In Chinese culture, it is not the case that the wife takes the husband’s surname. I don’t say last name because the traditional order in Chinese is surname followed by personal name. My wife, like many in the region, also has an English personal name that precedes her surname. So, for example, if my wife’s surname before marriage was “Lim” (common among Chinese in Southeast Asia) her full name is EnglishPersonalName Lim ChinesePersonalName. After marriage it would be unchanged.
HOWEVER (and this is the odd part), she would be referred to as “Madame Jones” when people talked about her because she would be the matriarch of our household. So “Madame Jones” would be like a title but not her legal name. All forms, passports, bank accounts, etc., would still be EnglishPersonalName Lim ChinesePersonalName.
Needless to say, few organizations have name fields that correctly and properly allow her full name to be recorded and used. So, she usually goes by EnglishPersonalName Lim in daily life.
I knew a Jewish kid in college who was named “Israel” by his parents, at least as far as his official Jewish name went, but they didn’t want people calling him “Izzy” so they gave him the name “Elliot” as his legal name. Apparently the risk of people calling him “Elly” did not occur to them.
And there’s more of a problem with “Elly” than with “Izzy”?
I guess I was familiar with there being a celebrity comedian called Shelley Berman, that I didn’t notice until much later that Shelley and Shelly are way more often female names.
Mitch, Shelly (for a man) is just the common nickname for Sheldon. Two of my father’s friends were called Shelly.
As a baseball-card-collecting kid, I was always amused by the “girls’ names” sported by Nellie Fox and Minnie Minoso.
Mrs. Shrug’s first name, in the shortened form she informally goes by, is gender-ambigious, but the spelling she prefers is more frequently used by males than females, so she tends to get a lot of cold calls and chairty pleas and such addressed to “Mr. —“)
Once before when something like this tangent came up, I mentioned two famous men first-named Lynn. One was the football player Lynn Swann. The other, I’m sorry to now have to call the late Lynn Harrell, an internationally-known cellist, from the Chicago area, who died a couple weeks ago, age 76. He was a fun and gracious guest on the local classical radio WFMT, putting together a playlist and chatting with the broadcasters.
Here is a link to his performance in the Dvořák concerto, unfortunately not video of the performance. https://youtu.be/FVWeEa0QG8E
Bill: there was also the great drummer Shelly Manne.
I have, surprise, a Jewish last name as my maiden name (We’ll use Cohen for discussion). Due to husband’s family name having been anglicized when his paternal grandfather became a US Citizen (with the removal of ini from the end of the surname) he has a “English” sounding surname (making no sense as there is no Smithini) we will use Smith for his surname because if I have to type “surname”, “maiden name” over and over I will go messuggah.
I started using Meryl A. Cohen Smith after we got married, intending to later change it just Smith something which has never happened. I currently am – depending on what and where my name is being used – Meryl A. Cohen, Meryl A. Smith, or Meryl A. Cohen Smith and even sometimes, to deal with the whims of computer software, Meryl A.Cohen-Smith or Meryl A. CohenSmith. Sometimes the initial A is there and sometimes it is not. (in the 18th century to make life even more fun I am Anne Everyman (pronounced Everah mon).
When I was applying for a passport it was the mid 1970s. We were concerned about plane hijackings – to put it simply – where Jewish people were being sorted out. So I went with Meryl A.Smith. My driver’s license is Cohen-Smith, M (actual name is a bit longer and there was no room for Meryl on license or many credit cards). I have only used my passport to go on 2 trips to Canada after all these years and sometimes for second ID in odd situations.
I have never had a problem with this.
Until IRS decided that all tax preparers should take an exam to be licensed to prepare returns. I am not a CPA, attorney or enrolled agent so I had to take the exam. The exams were to be given at a third party company that is in the business of giving job related exams. My name on my ID had to exactly match the name on my professional’s account with IRS. But that was Meryl Cohen Smith. Neither my driver’s license or passport matched. It took me so long to find out what to do and to do it (easy – duh! change the name on my IRS professional account) that the mandate to take the test was ruled illegal. But since I did not take that test,every year I have to take classes from a private company (at my cost of course) instead.
Why not change to his name right away when we got married? The woman ahead of me in line at Macys had done that – on her license and not her credit card – she could not show matching ID as she was in the middle of changing. So I changed to the double name intending “when everything evened off” after the change to then change to “Smith” but never had a chance to do so – because 40 years passed like 2 months.
Oh, and the A in Meryl A may or may not refer to my middle name – it is also his real surname initial. I have never been sure which name I intended it to be.