h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My father went to school with a girl who was blighted by the surname "Bone" her parents unwittingly christened her "Nora"

Troll sat alone on his seat of stone,
And munched and mumbled a bare old bone;
For many a year he had gnawed it near,
For meat was hard to come by.

-- J R R Tolkien

Tolkien had lots of great poems and songs in his books, which most readers just skipped over, I suspect.

I remember reading Lord of the Rings to my daughter when she was about 10. She thought the poem about the Rohan warriors going to 'Mundburg', with its Old English syllabic structure and alliteration was "cool".

Death in the morning and at day's ending
lords took and lowly. Long now they sleep
under grass in Gondor by the Great River.
Grey now as tears, gleaming silver,
red then it rolled, roaring water:
foam dyed with blood flamed at sunset;
as beacons mountains burned at evening;
red fell the dew in Rammas Echor.

Reminds me of Hiawatha, that last one.

Some people keep their names but change the order. David Henry Thoreau became Henry David Thoreau when he published "Walden."

My aunt Phyllis was Margaret Phyllis, but never used her first name. it came in handy when in her eighties she disliked being called Phyllis by little slips of nurses in hospital. 'Margaret' on the other hand didn't bother her at all for the very reason that it was not familiar.

Good story!

My grandfather hated his birth first and middle names enough to drop them to their initials.

He was born Beulah Therman, but legally changed his name to B.T. Even my father, his son did not know until after his death what his birth name was. He always went by Buddy.

Okay, if my name was Beulah, I'd change it, too.

That's like being a Boy Named Sue. Especially if this was in Texas.

Yep. Texas.

As a child, I was even embarrassed by my father's middle name being Robert - that was such an English name. Not something I could admit to in Ireland.

Mind you, it was cool that his initials were DR and people often mistook him for a Doctor.

I usually drop my first and middle names and introduçe myself by my first two initials (a commonplace in the southwest Oklahoma culture of my early chiildhood) simply because it makes me squirm a little to hear my cajun French first and middle names pronouced 'Okie' style, in American English phonetics, on the one hand and it also makes me uncomfortable when people attempt to make the correct French pronunciation, which was never used in the home.

The first and middle initials are easy to remember and pronounce though, and that's what I'm most accustomed to heariing.

My middle name is so unusual that I sometimes adapt it for passwords.

Then don't tell anybody what it is.

It is exceedingly rare that I tell anyone what it is. And very few would be able to guess it anyway.

Two of my children curse us for having given them two names, the first of which was to be the name they were known by. This has caused them many misunderstandings and arguments when filling in official forms.

Oh well, you live and learn. They have so far given their children very short names, followed by the male and female version of the same name - Johannes and Johanna - both of which crop up in all families as first or second Christian names.

The story goes that my father's family name "Neill" was only entered on his birth certificate that way because his father was too drunk, due to finally having produced a son, to explain that his name was "O'Neill". We haven't thoroughly researched this yet, but it may or may not be true. My father remembers that his father did have an Irish accent, but he died when he (my father) was very young. Can't have been the drink, though. My father drank at least one tot of whisky daily for 70 years, if not more, and stayed alive a long time to carry out that feat.

Daily for 70 years... what age did he begin?

So you're an O'Neill. Without the O it's a very English name, but with the O it names a long-running dynasty of Irish kings, both High Kings and kings of various parts of Ulster.

From what I gather it was the Ulster variant. Does that make me a descendant of Shane O'Neill?

He certainly started drinking in the Navy, which he joined at the age of 19 in 1939 when war broke out, and was still drinking - albeit slightly less - up until he died aged 1989. He may well have been drinking before 1939, as he left school and ventured out into the "real world" in his early teens.

To check out the story, I have looked up my aunts on one of those genealogy websites and found his sister's marriage date. She was 12 years older than him and her maiden name was registered as "Neill" - not "O'Neill". Maybe the O' was dropped a generation earlier.

At one stage Irish people who dropped the O in their name and became Protestants were given free soup and presumably other benefits. They were known as "soupers". So there are many Irish names where the version with O is used by Catholics and the one without by Protestants

Was the soup any good?

I don't know.

I grew up reading Irish history books, which presented the entire history of the world with an anti-English slant. They could not have admitted that the English people trying to bring civilisation to the "ignorant" Irish made good soup.