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.
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/
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
Reminds me of the character BJ in M*A*S*H. Named after his parents, Bea and Jay
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 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.
Deleted
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!
Hairy Ass
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”
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’m skeptical. This could be true, or AI generated nonsense. It does link to a source, but I can’t verify the source.
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 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.
Is a middle name mandatory for you?
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.
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.
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
A friend in high school had a middle name of “J”
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…”
