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/
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.
There is a theory that America is named not after Amerigo Vespucci, but after Richard ap Meryk also known as Richard Amerike, who owned the ship that sent John Cabot across the Atlantic. I think it’s mostly been refuted at this point, but the name has stuck with me.
Is this the genesis of British “humour”? Thomas, a Becket, even got the name in the time of Shakespeare.
Waiting for somebody to eviscerate me over British history, cause all I know is Monty Python.
I think you’re going to need some Blackadder to go along with your Monty Python.
Start with the second series though, as the first series is a little weaker (the characters and style are a bit different), and might put you off.
Interesting, I generally prefer the first series over the others, though I haven’t seen the last one yet
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.
Poor Alex Song (A.S.S.)
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
The famous poet Edgar Poe also didn’t have a middle name
He does, it’s Allan
I have two. You can borrow one for a while.
He’s the only person I’ve known here in almost 50 years without a middle name. It’s quite possible other people haven’t had a middle name but it’s never come up.
Not that I’m aware of Gerry F. Flap.
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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
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 don’t know that it’s absolutely mandatory but it’s definitely pervasive.
I think so, when immigrants get IDs in the US I believe they choose/are given a middle name
Not true, I am a naturalized US citizen, and don’t have a middle name - it was never an issue and I was never asked to come up with one. My son was born in the US and also doesn’t have a middle name.
My cousin was given his mother’s maiden name as a middle name when he joined the navy
Huh. Interesting.
What else would your mom call you when she’s pissed off?
I’ve usually seen NMN used for no middle name.
Back in the 90’s I worked for a guy whose first name is “H”.
Pronounced as Aitch or Haitch?
Haitch
I knew an H Jay.
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!
Homer Jay Simpson Or Homer J. Simpson
If his name is S why is there a period… like an abbreviation.
Came here for this!
People are used to adding periods so they just add it in.
Source: My middle name is a letter.
Y?
Y not?
Y not and x not is not y or x.
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.
I have a friend who has on paper, no first name and they go by their middle name. It causes a lot of problems on government documents depending which party decides to be pedantic about which name goes where
Because sometimes they insist on abbreviating. It is just a stupid abbreviation.
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”
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.
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.
Hairy Ass
A friend in high school had a middle name of “J”
My father’s middle name is J. Just the letter. His father’s name was JQ, just the letters.
Gifs that end too soon.
It stands for “Jay”
This is exactly where my brain went.
I’m skeptical. This could be true, or AI generated nonsense. It does link to a source, but I can’t verify the source.
You can’t trust a historian’s biography or his official museum‽ Don’t trust TechSpot’s exaggerated headlines.
“I do my own research” is a short walk away from “I trust only my own sources”
In case you were referring to me, how was my comment any of that?
not you, the person you were commenting about.
This is the reference. It’s a dotgov.
To be fair to the person above, that’s actually the source given for how Truman wrote his own name, not for the S not standing for anything. The reference for that is number 8, which is a book rather than a website. That said, the one you linked does back up the S not standing for anything anyway
Speaking of number 8…
That she chose it herself and is responsible for a lot of unicode’s emojis says to me that she was this close to being Jennifer 🙏 Lee or similar
I had no idea about the emoji thing until I read that. I just know her as an author.
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)
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.
Pretty sure it’s Jesus H Roosevelt Christ
You forgot his baptismal name. It’s Jesus H Roosevelt Mary Christ
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.
Harry “Cool S” Truman
