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.
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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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/
Yeah, that's just odd. 'A' isn't something you'd find before a surname as part of the name, unlike 'd' or 'o' etc.
In Wales they used to use ab/ap as a patronym, a bit like Mac in Gallic. There might have been similar in parts of whatever they called England before the anglo-saxons came, but that's not likely to have influenced anything by the time of Becket, or the later time when the 'a' was added.
I don't think it has really survived in Wales either; the 'a' has often dissapeared and the p/b merged with the fathers name, like Prichard, or Bowen.
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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
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.
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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.
Y?
Y not?
I have a family member whose middle name is a letter. A friend of mine has two family members that only have initials for their first name (one was named for the other). When the older joined the army they just gave him a name that fit the initials and that went on all his official paperwork.
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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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That also reminds me of this one public speaker back in 30 A.D. Jesus H Christ. Apparently the H is just an H. Who woulda thought.
I thought H stood for Harold. As in, "our father, who art in heaven, Harold be thy name..."
Lano and Woodley fan by any chance?
Never heard of them, sorry. I got that from an old Straight Dope article.
Monkey D. Luffy type shit
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.
Moore enjoys rock climbing.[6]
This might be the most concise paragraph I've ever seen on Wikipedia!
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 have two. You can borrow one for a while.
Not that I'm aware of Gerry F. Flap.
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I knew that middle names are common in the US but I didn't know it's so deep in the culture
One of those things that’s just normal so we don’t talk about it I guess.
Is a middle name mandatory for you?
I've usually seen NMN used for no middle name.
Poor Alex Song (A.S.S.)
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Hairy Ass
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