LH fave Ben Yagoda has posted an expanded version of a piece he published last week in the Forward, and it provides a convincing answer to a frequently asked question. He starts with a joke his mother liked to tell, the one about the kid whose mother calls him “bubele” so constantly that when she asked him what he learned on his first day in school, he says “I learned my name was Irving.” He continues:
Years ago, I reviewed Margaret Drabble’s novel The Ice Age, which begins with an epigraph from a William Wordsworth poem, “London 1802”: “Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.” I opened the review by quoting the line and saying it was “not, as you might expect, the plaint of a Miami Beach widow.”
The humor in both cases, such as it was, rested on “Irving” and “Milton” being stereotypical American Jewish names. The stereotype is accurate. It is easy to think of examples (Irving Berlin, Irving “Swifty” Lazar; Milton Berle, Milton Friedman), and there’s also data to back it up. In a 2016 MIT study, researchers ingeniously culled data from Jewish U.S. soldiers in World War II (median birth date: 1917) and found that Irving was the single most common given name; Milton was 13th. Those scholars, and others, have briefly commented on the popularity of those two names and some others that made the top-thirty list for Jewish G.I.s: Sidney, Morris, Stanley, Murray, and Seymour.
But the comments have missed an important point about the phenomenon, which I call “My name is Irving” (MNII). It even slipped by the late Harvard sociologist Stanley (emphasis added) Lieberson, who wrote frequently and perceptively about the factors that go into parents’ naming decisions. In his 2000 book A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change, Lieberson mentioned his own first name, plus Irving and Seymour, and described them as attractive to Jewish parents because they were “names that [were]… popular with fellow Americans.”
That isn’t really true. As the MIT study says, MNII names “stand out as favored by the Jewish immigrants but not by the general population.” According to Social Security Records, Irving was the 106th most popular name for all boys born in 1917, Milton the 75th; Stanley did a bit better at number 34. The others listed above are similarly low in the general count, especially Murray (241) and Seymour (242).
Someone else who has written widely in the field, Warren Blatt, called “Irving, Morris, Sidney, Sheldon, etc. … Anglo-Saxon names that were popular 100 years ago.”
That moves the discussion in the right direction but is misleading, because the word “popular” implies that they were traditional first names. In fact, Irving, Milton, Sidney, Morris, Stanley, Murray, and Seymour are venerable upper-crust British surnames. Only two of them are even mentioned in The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (1947), Sidney and Stanley; the book notes that the latter’s “use as a christian name is apparently a recent development, originally due to the popularity of the explorer Henry Stanley (1841-1904).” […]
The last-name-to-first-name trend—which I’m not aware of having previously been discussed—hit quickly. Among the ten most common boys’ names for native-born members of Yiddish-speaking American households (that is, kids) in the 1910 census, there’s only one of the MNII type (Morris, at number seven). The others, in order, are Samuel, Louis, Harry, Jacob, Abraham, Isadore, Max, Benjamin, and Joseph.
What caused MNII to hit so soon after that? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it was not trivial. As Lieberson and a coauthor once observed, looking at first-name choices offers “a rare opportunity to study tastes in an exceptionally rigorous way.” I imagine the trend originated with some culture-loving Jews, who had been in the new country for a decade or more, who may have read Paradise Lost or seen Sir Henry Irving or one of his many thespian relatives on the stage, and thought such a distinguished name would cast a shimmering reflection on their sons. (And remember that they had a hall pass to use range freely in their choices because of the custom of giving kids a Hebrew or Yiddish names as well). Peers agreed, and soon the trend was viral.
MNII dissipated as quickly as hit, in some ways a victim of its own success. That is, it’s not necessarily attractive to give your kid a stereotypical name. There aren’t handy charts for later Jewish names along the lines of the World War II survey, but Social Security data for the whole country shows the MNII names peaking in popularity in the late teens and early ‘20s, then cratering.
In the 1930s and ‘40s, there were a lot of Normans, Henrys, Daniels, Jerrys, Howards, and Philips; and the popular ‘50s Jewish boys’ listed by Warren Blatt names rings true for my mischpoche: Alan, Andrew, Barry, Bruce, Eric, Jay, Marc, Michael, Peter, Richard, Robert, Roger, Scott, Steven, and Stuart. After that it was, and has been, back to the future, what with the flood of Noahs, Seths, Joshes, Sams, Bens, Isaacs, Abes, Maxes, and Jakes.
Isn’t that interesting? Click through for links and more details (as well as updating footnotes, like one on “why Irving, in particular, might have been so popular”).
And speaking of given names, my wife and I watched Ken Burns’ splendid new PBS series on the American Revolution, and among the very large cast of characters was one Albigence Waldo (1750-1794), a surgeon and diarist who wrote about the winter encampment at Valley Forge. I looked up that striking name and discovered the Joseph Bucklin Society page on Waldo, which explains that his sister Abigail married David Bucklin, who served in the Revolutionary Army:
Waldo’s personal sacrifice and the goodness and effectiveness of his efforts for the soldiers (which included Bucklins at Valley Forge) resulted in David Bucklin naming a son “Albigence”.
In memory of the events of the Revolutionary War, the David Bucklin family line deliberately continued to carry the name of “Albigence” for eight generations (two hundred years!), either as a first name or a middle name of a Bucklin boy.
Aside from them, however, I can find no one with that very odd name; it seems like it must, like the adjective Albigensian, be derived from the French city of Albi, but why? All theories are welcome.
Add one gilded lily, writer Sidney Sheldon (né Schechtel).
Was Ignatz Mouse Jewish?
I doubt it, since one of his ancestors was named Mark Antony Mouse.
I had no idea!
To the subject at hand, I will make up a theory out of thin air, namely that Yiddish theater started staging translated plays at that time, and these names came out of some particular popular plays.
That footnote 4 you mentioned is the main thing that Yagoda missed, and the custom of giving Jewish children names that alliterated with their Hebrew names continued long after 1917. My Hebrew name is Yitzchaq (all threads are one), and my parents chose “Jerry” because J is close to Y (and the I’s like “irving” and “Isidore” were out of fashion and stereotypical), and then “Gerald” because that’s the full name they thought of for the nickname “Jerry”—not expecting that in later decades, people who know my full name would think I misspelled my nickname.
This alliteration wasn’t new in 1917. The great-grandfather I’m named after, born in the Old Country, used the very Catholic secular name Ignatz. (I hope I’m not giving the impression that I remember which great-grandfather or country, but I’m kind of thinking Hungary.)
And “MNII” may have given a boost to the surname-to-first-name thing, but it wasn’t the origin. Wikipedia has quite a few goyish-looking Miltons from the 19th century, the first of whom is Rep. Milton Brown (W-Tenn.) (1804–1883). I imagine Jews of the early 20th century liked surnames as first names because it was a British and British-American thing, [ETA] and because there was a limited choice of not-too-Christian names, as Yagoda mentions.
Since “Stanley” was mentioned in the article, we must not forget Polish-Americans named “Stanley” as the closest possibility to “Stanisław”, and possibly nicknamed “Stosh”.
My father’s first name was Irving, and his Hebrew name was Israel— so I wonder if Irving was a standard replacement for an obviously Jewish traditional first name.
Yes, Israel or even more commonly Isaac (Yitzchaq or however you like to spell it). “Isidore” or “Isadore” was another common replacement. Probably also Isaiah and others.
The SSA list of US male names for YOB 1884 has Milton at #104, Sidney at #107, Irving at #176, Morris at #179 and Murray at #463, with Seymour and Sheldon not in the top 500. I think that’s consistent with the story that those names had already been repurposed from surnames to first names among 19th-century Gentile-Americans before they became super-common among Ashkenazic-Americans. The question is how easy it is to track (and the problem is that we have better Jewish samples for some specific cohorts than others) the extent to which Gentile use declined as Jewish use arose and the name became perceived as “Jewish-sounding,” ideally with a “control” as to the rate at which other names that had first become more common in the 19th century then naturally faded with churn even if not perceived as “Jewish-sounding.”
One of my great-grandfathers was named Sydney, and sometime referenced in writing as Sidney. I don’t think anyone thought that was a “Jewish-sounding” name when he was born and baptized in 1871, but the situation was otherwise among the cohorts forty or sixty years younger than him.
I think of “Ignatz” as transparently “Ignatius” and thus pretty churchy (and specifically Jesuit-related), but maybe not everyone would feel those overtones.
Some rather different discussion here: https://languagehat.com/the-ignatz-party/
One of my Cuban-Ashkenazic in-laws whose Hebrew name could be transliterated as Yitzchaq if you like was given “Isidoro” as his regular/Cuban name way back when he was born in Havana. I don’t know if San Isidoro was popular enough among Cuban Catholics of the time to make that a common name there in general. In American he has generally gone by “Ike” rather than “Izzy” but of course when he arrived in the U.S. as a teenager “Ike” was the President’s nickname.
The born-in-the-Fifties list (Alan, Andrew, Barry, Bruce, Eric, Jay, Marc, Michael, Peter, Richard, Robert, Roger, Scott, Steven, and Stuart) may be accurate, but it’s overwhelmingly NOT names that are “Jewish-sounding” such that you would be the least bit surprised to find a Gentile of that age bearing them. Maybe “Jay,” a bit? And come to think of it one kid I knew in high school who was “Marc” rather than “Mark” was indeed Jewish so perhaps there was something there or at least I don’t understand the pattern-if-there-is-one for who uses the less common spelling variant. We’ve even had a Gentile-American president (Obama) who was frequently known by “Barry” as a teenager.
Peter and Andrew are good illustrations of how the alleged desire to avoid “churchy-sounding” names does not manifest consistently, although as an anecdote is support of such avoidance I had a Jewish law school classmate named James and multiple other Jewish classmates said they found that an unexpected first name for a Jew (maybe because “Jacob” is readily available as a more “ethnic” alternative?).
The born-in-the-Fifties list … may be accurate, but it’s overwhelmingly NOT names that are “Jewish-sounding” such that you would be the least bit surprised to find a Gentile of that age bearing them.
He didn’t say or imply that they were “Jewish-sounding,” he just said they were the names Jews switched to. (Presumably by then they had a better idea of how to assimilate, if that’s what they were doing.)
I feel like we talked fairly recently – by which I probably mean maybe within the last year – about WASPy names which are so completely made of surnames that they work any way round. I would have thought that predated the Jewish fashion, so maybe the whole thing was actually copying something that was already going on.
It always feels primarily American to me, but there was a bit of a fashion for it in Victorian England – (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling, (Giles) Lytton Strachey… – although maybe it was more usual there to still have a common first name which just wasn’t being used.
What is it with fruit surnames? I was previously aware of Ben Yagoda (strawberry in Bulgarian) and now Curtis Sliwa (plum). EDIT: The surname of my maternal grandfather also refers to a plant, actually, now that I think of it, but a non-fruit tree. EDIT2: apparently it’s technically a fruit. Taxonomy is weird.
I didn’t mean to suggest that he had said or implied that. But it would be useful to have a numerical comparison. It seems plausible that e.g. “Bruce” could have been 2x or 3x more common among Jewish kids born in 1954 than among (some comparable set of?) gentile kids born the same year without that driving up the Jewish percentage of the overall Alan-American population to the point where the disproportion would be noticed. But I don’t know that it was, and it would be interesting to know how much the distinctiveness of a given group’s naming practices came from heavier-than-average use of certain favored names versus lower-than-average use of certain disfavored names.
Of course local demographics matter. NYC sometimes releases baby-name popularity charts broken down by racial/ethnic category and such a high percentage of non-Hispanic white mothers of newborns within the five boroughs are Jewish you can get results like “Moshe” as the third-most-common name for male children of such mothers in 2015 (with “Chaya” at #9 on the girls’ side).
There is no equivalent phenomenon for women. Presumably, parents figured their daughters will be housewives and would not need to assimilate to succeed.
@JenInEd: I see that I mentioned the symmetrically-named Burnside Winslow (1881-1971) in a 2024 portion of this 2016-originated thread, but there may have been other discussions. https://languagehat.com/kurdilit/
Footnote 3 implies that Jerome is a last name…
See the extensive list under Surname here; Jerome K. Jerome is not only famous but amusingly self-redundant.
Robinson Crusoe suggests surnames were repurposed as soon as people no longer felt obligated to restrict their choices to the names of saints. Even so, however, it doesn’t seem to have happened in Protestant places that weren’t English-speaking – and, conversely, it remains the single most striking (and most immediately striking) thing about American onomastics.
It happened to some degree in Norway, especially in Northern Norway, through the tradition of naming (younger) children after important family friends and godparents. That ended in the 19th c. but there are traces of it in a few -sen names formed from original surnames.
@V 18:04
I think some of these are “Verballhornungen”, e.g., Yagoda from Jacob (Sliwa from Solomon?)
—
Apfel-, Epl- von Ephraim
Bern-, Birn-, Baren- weist auf den Vornamen Ber hin
[Hirsch- kann von Hersch abgleitet sein
Kersch-, Kirsch- s. Hirsch]
Mandel, Mandelbaum, Mandelbrot, Mendelssohn, abgeleitet vom Kurznamen für Menachem
—
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCdischer_Name
Ah yes, I forgot.
On the other hand, Birnbaum (and all the way to Bierbaumer) would be a literal translation of Pereira, to which compare Oliveira, Figueira…
Re daughters “not needing to assimilate” it’s not like the sisters of the Irving-and-Milton cohort had “unassimilated” foreign-sounding names. Rather, they mostly had “regular” American names without much so-extreme-as-to-be-noticed overweighting in a few key ones.
Fictional example: the fictitious Seymour Glass (fictitiously born in 1917 so right in that cohort) had fictitious younger sisters named Beatrice and Frances and a fictitious wife named Muriel, all of which seem plausible for either a Jewish or gentile American female of the relevant fictitious years-of-birth.
It may have helped on the female side that except for Mary there weren’t very many high-frequency American given names that came with excessively-Christian perceived baggage. Other popular “Bible names” were mostly Old Testament, like Sarah or Deborah, and “Elizabeth” was primarily perceived as “as in the queen” rather than “as in the mother of John the Baptist.” Likewise names like Barbara or Helen were not primarily viewed in the context of the saints who had been the original reason the names entered the common onomastic stock.
Actually Yagoda ex Judah (Yehuda) is probably a better guess than Jacob…
JKJ’s father was originally called Jerome Clapp, and renamed himself redundantly.
I also think of Jerome as primarily a saint’s name – there are people surnamed George and Andrew and so on, but you wouldn’t include them in a list of surnames used as first names.
(Coincidentally, JKJ’s older brother was called Milton!)
…especially given *[g] > [ɦ] in Ukrainian and southern Russian, I guess…!
Of course there can be round trips (as I guess in Norwegian) where surnames that become used as given names had themselves started off as patronymics derived from a given name. One example (striking if unusual) is the fellow who endowed Johns Hopkins University who was indeed named Johns Hopkins (1795-1873) rather than John Hopkins, the unusual given name having gotten into his family from a great-grandmother whose maiden name was Margaret Johns.
Not of Genrikh Yagoda, from a Jewish family of Polish origin, head of the NKVD until Stalin decided to have him executed and replaced him with Nikolay Yezhov, of pure Russian ancestry and minimal formal education?
Didn’t Goebbels call Jewish opponents “Isidor” in his court trials before 1933, to demonstrate that he didn’t take them in any way seriously?
Jerome is a good example of a “saint’s name” that was not perceived as such in the 20th-century U.S. to an extent that inhibited Ashkenazic-American parents from using it. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld, for example, is formally Jerome and the same is true for many other Ashkenazic Jerrys. (Jerry-for-Gerald strikes me as more likely to be Irish-American although certainly not exclusively so.)
url: I was aware of Nikolay Yezhov, but not of Genrikh Yagoda, until a few hours ago.
@ulr
At least one opponent…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Wei%C3%9F_(police_executive)
as JF said, the structuring element of these english names is how they echo the underlying yiddish name. which isn’t just about a matching initial: there’s a pull towards larger sonic matching (as with my grandfather sheldon/shimshon), and towards resonances of meaning and association which could be direct or distant*. these english/yiddish dual namings were never quite as formalized in the u.s. as classic shem/kinui combinations like “arye leyb”, but my suspicion is that they came pretty close for a few decades, and that a large percentage of, say, morrises were moyshele to their grandparents. and other kinds of desirable resonances would make a difference too, especially with the single names by which the famous are known: a great poet understood to have solid democratic credentials (milton); the greatest actor of the era, reinforced by a canonized Founding Author (irving); etc.
the choices would certainly be influenced by avoiding overtly christian names – but not necessarily in any relation to u.s. anglo christian names! the associations a name had in immigrant parents’ places of origin were far more significant, especially in a place like nyc, where they wouldn’t’ve necessarily had much contact with christian social spheres (and when they did, they were more likely to be other immigrants than old-line english or dutch, or even irish). and surname-as-kinui is a simple way to get around that whole issue, especially given the broad anglo-u.s. use of the strategy.
but another whole element is that a significant proportion of bearers of these names did not get them from their parents. some were self-chosen, built off a solely yiddish given name. some were changed from a less appealing parentally-assigned english version (whether completely or partially**. and some likely stuck after being hung on kids by school teachers or administrators insistant that you couldn’t be American with a name like that, just as they took it upon themselves to solve the problem that you couldn’t be American with vowels like that.
i don’t think that there’s actually much difference in how any of this works with women’s names, just a number of ways that the names themselves aren’t as visible. apart from the lack of a corpus comparable to the u.s. military records, which this piece and others have been based on, there’s the structural misogyny in rabbinic ritual practice that makes a woman’s shem show up much less frequently than a man’s***, and the similar pattern in pre-women’s-movement journalism, to name a few factors. i can keep citing myself as an example: i don’t know what name my grandmother has in her mother’s shul’s records – but i’m quite sure the gertrudes, ethels, enids, eunices, reginas, alices, and so on of her generation were also using english names that matched and echoed the names they were known by at home.
.
* i suspect that’s my other grandfather, yidl nukhm (we assume yehude nekhome), who glossed his name rather dubiously as “free jew”, was originally given “julius” to work with because a name with a heroic meaning should be matched with a legendary/historical hero’s name.
** that same grandfather was never “julius” after he started to have a say in it in his teens; his name was jules.
*** i’m not sure when women began saying aliyes regularly in which denominations, but it’s a pretty solidly late-20thC phenomenon; the first girl to be bas-mitsved was born in 1910, and the innovation was quite slow to catch on.
But there’s the asymmetry: the “gertrudes, ethels, enids, eunices, reginas, alices, and so on” of that generation did not (working from that list) have names that were as “Jewish-sounding” because of disproportionate usage patterns as the Miltons and Irvings and Seymours of the same age — any WASP of my age could well have had a great-aunt with one of those names.* To one of rozele’s other points, one of my late first wife’s Ashkenazic grandmothers did not have a Hebrew name because it had not been thought necessary at the time and place of her birth (somewhere between 1910 and 1915, somewhere near what is now the border between Lithuania and Belarus) to give her one. So he had only one given name – a common Slavic one – which in the fullness of time got informally replaced by a more American sounding one with similar phonemes.
*My great-great-uncle Jack was widowed and then remarried so for one part of his life he was married to Aunt Harriet and for another part he was married to Aunt Regina. If I tell you that one but not both of those two ladies was of ethnic Jewish ancestry/upbringing (although eventually finding her way into the Prot. Episc. Ch.) can you really guess which was which from the names with better-than-chance odds of getting it right? (One of the two may have a more WASP-marked middle name, but I had to look those up on the internet.)
Gosh, lots to respond to here.
I’d say the classic identifiably Jewish but not Hebrew or Yiddish girl’s name was “Sadie”. I can’t think of any others offhand.
I don’t remember any Jewish Peters around my age, but I can think of a Paul and lots of Marks. “James” would never have occurred to me as a non-Jewish name, since I knew a Jewish Jimmy and a Jamie in elementary school, and I don’t remember anyone my age (a few years older than J.W.) saying that any name didn’t sound Jewish. I remember thinking that about the one Jewish “John” I knew (there were plenty of “Jon”s), and I think I remember adults saying the same thing. “John” ,”Mary” and “Ann” were probably the last to be accepted. On the other hand “Molly” has a long Jewish-American history—the actress Molly (born Malka in 1898) Picon, and there was a Molly not much younger than her in my family. Likewise I had a relative of my parents’ generation named Anita.
@rozele:
I agree that it’s not just a matching initial, but that’s very common even when there’s no other resemblance, as in my name. One exception is “Bernard”, which I imagine often comes from “Dov” meaning “bear”. By my day “Bernard” was out of style, but I remember a boy named Brian in my religious-school class saying his Hebrew name was Berl. I think he said that’s what his grandparents called him. The Hebrew teachers called him Dov.
Sometimes there’s no apparent connection. I remember a Mark whose Hebrew name was Gershom or Gershon.
some were self-chosen, built off a solely yiddish given name.
Grandpa Friedman, for example.
the first girl to be bas-mitsved was born in 1910, and the innovation was quite slow to catch on.
My mother, now in her nineties, was one of the first group of girls bat-mitzva-ed at her Conservative shul. (Obviously you couldn’t have one girl having a bat-mitzva all to herself.)
More thread convergence: You mentioned a Founding Author, and earlier today I noticed that the German (!) Wikipedia credits Washington Irving as the author of the first Kurzgeschichten in history.
Jerome is our favourite patron saint in Dalmatia.
I imagine there are also many diaspora Croatians using the name – though in the USA probably using “Jerry” and “Jerome” rather than the native “Jeronim”, “Jere” and – to the American ears funny-sounding- “Jerko”.
That might explain why some people (in Yu) were convinced that Jerry Lewis was Croatian. Why, even his original surname was “Lević”.
@DM and others: Surnames as given names go way back in both Britain and America. The English admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell (1650–1707) and the American clergyman Cotton Mather (1663–1728) both got their mother’s maiden name, or if you prefer their maternal grandfather’s surname.
As I thought I mentioned but apparently didn’t the last time this subject came up, the use of British surnames as given names has even spread to Latin America.
@Jerry F.: Not suggesting you would have met either personally, but the catalog of human beings sufficiently “notable” to have wikipedia articles in English devoted to them presently includes unmodified Peter Friedman (an actor still alive at age 76) and the more carefully specified “Peter Friedman (documentary filmmaker)” who died earlier this year at age 66.
I think Sadie-for-Sarah is likely old enough in the U.S. to predate the emergence of distinctively Ashkenazic-American naming practices. Wikipedia’s list of notable American Sadies includes gentiles like Sadie Grant Peck (born 1877, holder of one of the higher offices in the Mormon church in which women were eligible to serve) and Sadie T.M. Alexander (born 1898, first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics). Similarly, I don’t think the Sadie Hawkins character in Li’l Abner was intended to be understood as Jewish, although maybe by then it was an archaic-sounding (and thus “rustic”/yokel) name in gentile circles? Wikipedia advises me that her father was Hekzebiah Hawkins, which is exactly the sort of “Hebrew” name that could only be borne in the U.S. by a backwoods Protestant.
I do think that Sarah, w/o getting into related nicknames, is probably a name that in many cohorts was materially more common among Jewish women than non-Jewish American women of the same year-of-birth, yet was also so longstanding a common WASP name that such a differential usage pattern was just not enough to get it perceived as Jewish-coded. (In the U.S. – things were no doubt otherwise in other countries w/o the distinctive US fondness for “Old Testament” names.)
By my day “Bernard” was out of style, …
I agree I associate that more with my parents’ generation. I had an Uncle(-in-law) Bernard, all Irish and Catholic background, so named for the Saint? A Bernard born 1930, Russian Jewish ancestry/strict Catholic upbringing. There was a Bernard in my year at school. (Apologies, I didn’t inquire as to his cultural background; surname Watson — and don’t ask how I remember that.)
Leonard Marx (b. 1887), Julius Marx (1890), and Milton Marx (1892), are early examples, along with the not particularly Jewish-sounding brothers Arthur and Herbert (plus Manfred, who died as a baby). Their parents, Simon (Americanized to Sam for some reason) and Miene (> Minnie), from Alsace and Lower Saxony respectively, were quite secular. Julius was named for an uncle, so Milton is the only one which strictly fits the trend here.
Samuel (1895), Moses (1897), and Jerome (1903), sons of Jennie and Solomon Horwitz, had a brother Isidor (1891), who went by “Irving.”
i generally wonder about the shifting jewish-marked-ness of these various names, across times and contexts. even the yagoda/wordsworth line (which is excellent!*) is more about milton being common among jews of a certain generation (clearly true!) than about it being understood as diagnostic.
and when it comes to the “gertrudes, ethels, enids, eunices, reginas, alices, and so on” i invoked, i think many of those names (maybe all but alice) were to some degree marked – it was certainly a circulating witticism when i was in college in the 1990s that there were only two kinds of eunice: 80ish and jewish or 20ish and korean. but i expect that marking would’ve varied a lot geographically and socially (you have to be disproportionately around old jews to have an opinion), and i expect could be pretty easily affected by other groups that favored the same names (i’m thinking of non-jewish central europeans, germans in particular).
—
Julius was named for an uncle
whenever i see these kinds of explanations, i find myself wondering what name of the relative’s was being followed, because “named after” can be so flexible in these contexts.
.
* and now i’m thinking about which miltons did and didn’t know they were of the devil’s party: friedman certainly did, but not with uncle william’s positive connotation.
If being called Julius makes you Jewish, why does being called Mark Anthony make you definitely not?
(I would actually have guessed that an American Julius was black.)
The Horwitz family (mentioned by MMcM), lived for a while with their uncle Julius when the kids were small. Now I think about it, my grandfather’s brother Julek was a Julius, too.
why does being called Mark Anthony make you definitely not?
Ahem! (As somebody with a horse in this race.) The original Roman one (gentile name) is Antony with no ‘h’.
Julius suspected to be from Greek, or Latin “devoted to Jove”, doublet of Jules. Anything starting J- is likely to be the Hebrew, innit.
John Julius Norwich “given the name “Julius” in part because he was born by caesarean section.” [wikip]
@AntC
—
John Julius Norwich “given the name “Julius” in part because he was born by caesarean section.”
—
Presumably by his Papa, who found this exceedingly clever and lost no time in mentioning the connexion on numerous occasions, whilst Mama remained silent, exercising the forbearance for which she was renowned, and which was the cornerstone of her happy marriage.
As an example parallel to “Milton” of a surname-turned-given-name that was perhaps chosen because of the literary fame associated with a prior bearer of the surname, consider the legendary race-car driver Emerson Fittipaldi. Who was of course born (1946) and raised in Brazil, but wikipedia, at least, confirms that his parents did indeed have Ralph Waldo on their mind. His father (born 1920 in Brazil to a family of Italian origin) was Wilson Fittipaldi, presumably after Woodrow. In the U.S. Emerson has recently become somewhat popular as a name for baby girls – in the top 200 since year-of-birth 2014 but not yet in the top 100. I suspect that Fittipaldi was not a factor in whatever causal chain led to this.
For my generation, the most famous living Julius when we were kids was likely the basketball player Julius (“Dr. J.”) Erving (not “Irving”!). Which may skew our sense of the racial/ethnic distribution of the name, although there are several names that were in my youth at least perceived as at least modestly stereotypically black (meaning not that there were no white bearers, but that there was a noticeable statistical skew), which at various other times might have been similarly perceived as modestly stereotypically Jewish. Jerome and Maurice would be other examples. (In the Ashkenazic context Maurice seems like kind of an allophone of Morris.)
One of the 20th century’s more prominent Miltons of non-Ashkenazic ancestry was Milton Stover Eisenhower, younger brother of the president of that surname and an accomplished figure in his own right. I would suspect that his first name was not perceived as “Jewish-sounding” in his birthplace of Abilene, Kansas when he was born in 1899.
As an example parallel to “Milton” of a surname-turned-given-name that was perhaps chosen because of the literary fame associated with a prior bearer of the surname, consider the legendary race-car driver Emerson Fittipaldi.
I was bitterly disappointed by what followed, having expected to hear of someone with the given name Fittipaldi (“Fitz” to friends and family).
There are plenty of traditional Yiddish feminine given names which aren’t etymologically Yiddish or Hebrew, including Beila, Czarna and Dobra. And the traditions of naming girls were evolving fairly fast even in the old countries because the “Hebrew” names of women aren’t sacred in a way the male shem ha-kodesh is, meaning that any name may pass the “test”. In one branch of my family Yegudka became the traditional family given name passed down from generation to generation, even though it started as a Polish nickname of their famous matriarch, meaning Little Berry.
Interesting stuff about generational shifts! In my intuition Isidore is kind of the same as Irving, but I see the different imprint of the era now. Probably driven by the fact that the gentiles abandoned the names which acquired association with Jewishness, which in turn stigmatized these names among the Jews themselves
Oh, and, rozele, isn’t Morris a Morduch rather than Moyshe?
It’s not a repurposed surname, really, but the death of reggae legend Jimmy Cliff just led me to the trivia fun-fact that the “Ivan Martin” character he famously played in the film _The Harder They Come_ was formally named Ivanhoe Martin. Which in turn led me to discover that Jamaica once boasted a prominent cricketer named Ivanhoe Mordecai Barrow (1911-1979, and “the first West Indian to score a century in a Test match in England”), who was “Ivan” for short. And it turns out that Barrow’s family was part of Jamaica’s small community of Sephardim.
That said, the more immediate source of the name for Cliff’s character may have been the real-life Jamaican outlaw Vincent Martin (1924-1948), who had a bunch of pseudonyms and/or nicknames including “Ivanhoe.”
Fascinating, thanks for all the Ivanhoniana!
@Jerry Friedman said:
Surnames as given names go way back in both Britain and America. The English admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell (1650–1707) and the American clergyman Cotton Mather (1663–1728) both got their mother’s maiden name, or if you prefer their maternal grandfather’s surname.
Indeed they do: one of the first examples was Lady Jane Grey’s husband Guildford Dudley, born around 1535. Sir Winston Churchill’s ancestor and namesake, father of the 1st Duke of Marlborough, was given his mother’s maiden name.
Withycombe’s ‘Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names’ (2nd ed., 1950) says that the custom was limited to the upper classes before the 19th century, and that some names of aristocratic families such as Neville, Russell and Howard are now used by people with no connection to those families.
When Merrick Garland was nominated for the Supreme Court in 2016 I expressed surprise that someone with such an aggresively WASP-y name was Jewish to which my best friend (who I should add is Jewish himself) just chortled like “Phhft, that’s the oldest trick in the Jew book”
“consider the legendary race-car driver Emerson Fittipaldi.”
Because of my long standing interest in capoeira and tradititional Brazilian music, I’ve come to know a lot of Brazilians, and I’ve been struck by how many men have names ending in a very un-Portuguese “-son”, often English surnames but some I’ve never heard anywhere else: Nelson, Adilson, Wilson, Gerson, Edson, etc etc. I wondered if this pattern of sounds had some cachet for aspirational parents.
>Withycombe’s ‘Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names’ (2nd ed., 1950) says that the custom was limited to the upper classes before the 19th century, and that some names of aristocratic families such as Neville, Russell and Howard are now used by people with no connection to those families.
This feels like non sequitur, or I’m not understanding something. Or is this just two unrelated but interesting facts about English surname customs?
I feel pretty certain “limited to the upper classes” refers strictly to the passing on of a mother’s maiden name as surname, and not to the general custom of giving/using surnames. But how would getting one’s mother’s aristo surname yield “people with no connections to those families”?
I suppose what they are saying is that Neville Marriner’s father had, as a humble carpenter, ideas grossly above his station and pinched the name Neville, instead of using, if he required something other than the quite adequate Thomas, Peter, Michael, his wife’s more plebeian (and Welsh or Scottish-sounding) maiden name Roberts. Although that is hardly where the rot set in.
I think the passage that puzzled Ryan may be conflating two different things. Example: the first name of Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was presumably thought plausible by his parents because it was the middle name of his grandfather John Winston Spencer-Churchill (1822-1883), who in turn presumably got it because it had been knocking around the family ever since the birth of the remoter ancestor Winston Churchill (1620-1688), whose mother’s maiden name was Sarah Winston. That’s easy enough to understand. But then at some point predating the fame of the 1874-1965 Winston,* people who weren’t also descendants of Sarah Winston also started getting (in pretty modest numbers, at least in the U.S.) Winston as a given name. Quite possibly some of them had their own equivalent of Sarah Winston in their own family trees, but at least eventually others didn’t and one would like to know what inspired the earliest sets of parents who made that leap, who then helped provide a critical mass of examples to future parents confirming that “Winston” was in the available stock of potential given names. That’s the transition – once you’ve been exposed to enough other kids named “Neville” as a first name, it seems like a plausible first name to give your own kid w/o worrying that people will think you’re fraudulently implying a connection to the famous Neville family. Although of course in the U.S. the famous Nevilles aren’t Norman gentry landowners but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neville_Brothers.
*Most bearers of Winston as a given name notable enough to be listed by wikipedia were born after the 1874-1965 one was extremely famous, but not all. Indeed, when that fellow first began getting his name into the newspapers in the U.S. he was frequently confused with the then-prominent (but no relation) American novelist Winston Churchill (1874-1947), whose mother’s maiden name was Blaine although I can’t be sure he didn’t have a Miss Winston who had married into the family tree further up.
Maybe his parents just thought Winston sounded good like a name should.
Was the old practice of men addressing each other by their surnames an impetus for using surnames as given names?
@Y one pathway that’s a bit different than what you suggest is that of surnames (especially but not only those from the bearer’s family tree) being used as middle names and some individuals ending up being commonly called by their middle name rather than their first name, which would then help model the use of that surname as if a first name. Consider, e.g., T. Jefferson Coolidge (1831-1920), who was a direct descendant of THE Thomas Jefferson but apparently didn’t go by Thomas. OTOH, THE Jefferson Davis* had by then already been given that name at birth in 1808 w/ no Thomas involved. And became famous/notorious enough in his own right that “Jefferson” as a first name may have fallen out of favor post-1865 in families (or at least regions?) that admired Thomas J. but not Jefferson D. Although things are apparently otherwise in Brazil, where (consistent with the pattern noted above) there have been multiple prominent soccer players named Jefferson plus a few named Jéferson.
*I suppose Davis Jefferson would be an equally cromulent sequence? A two-surname combo where both are patronymics!
There are plenty of traditional Yiddish feminine given names which aren’t etymologically Yiddish or Hebrew, including Beila, Czarna and Dobra.
And probably Yente, which went downhill in the hands of Yiddish-language American humorists in the early 20th century, according to Wikipedia.
@Kate Bunting: Indeed they do: one of the first examples was Lady Jane Grey’s husband Guildford Dudley, born around 1535.
Thanks for the antedating. I note that the aristocratic name Dudley is one that became a given name.
rozele, isn’t Morris a Morduch rather than Moyshe
o, you’re probably right; it’s a better match. it’d take some proper research to see if one or the other predominated, but mordkhe and moyshe would be the big mo! names in play. (there must be some mordkhe / mortimer doublets out there, too, but i don’t have time to go prospecting in the broken search engines)
and, just to muddy the waters more: i expect a lot of the u.s. morrises would’ve been named with morris winchevsky in mind – but his parents (in 1850s latvia) named him “lipe bentsien novakhovits”, and he went by “ben nets” (as a newspaper editor) and “leopold benedikt” (at his dayjob). the Leksikon doesn’t have anything to say about “moris” (or “vintshevski”, for that matter), but he certainly didn’t take the name til he got to london in 1879.
I didn’t know that. Back home, Gertrud(e) is unremarkable in my parents’ generation, and Regina regionally in mine, and I’m aware of one Edeltraut in my parents’ generation, but the others are unknown, and Enid is as Extremely English as Nigel.
Isn’t Enid Welsh? I know what you’re implying, though.
Isn’t Enid Welsh?
Yep.
https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraint_ac_Enid
(Though the Middle Welsh tale itself is probably translated from Chrétien de Troyes’ Érec et Énide.)
Tennyson’s ghastly Idylls of the King seems to be responsible for the quondam vogue of the name in English. Presumably Tennyson got it from Lady Charlotte Guest’s version of the Welsh tale.
@V: Enid is etymologically Welsh, but in more modern times apparently became a vogue name in England and other Anglophone societies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because of its use by Tennyson, with that vogue not particularly concentrated among the small percentage of Anglophones who were actually Welsh. The vogue ended as vogues tend to, and wikipedia’s list of notable Enids has very few born after WW2. Although very few is not zero, and they don’t even list Enid Williams (born 1960), who was the original bassist of Girlschool.
At a superficial glance the list of notable Enids does not look to be particularly overweight with Ashkenazim, although it does include Enid Marx, said to be a distant cousin of Karl, and Enid Haupt (nee Annenberg), a publishing heiress and philanthropist said to have been “the greatest patron American horticulture has ever known.” (The Annenbergs had had seven daughters: Enid’s sisters, born between 1900 and 1914, were Diana, Esther, Janet, Lita, Evelyn, and Harriet.)
You can get convenience samples of Jewish-American names (if looking for data) at any number of niche websites, such as for example (male only) https://jewishbaseballnews.com/players/. That site also has a helpful (if you are interested in such things …) “not a Jew” page you can click over to, which contains inter alia a list of ‘Players with “Jewish-sounding” names who aren’t.’ Although that list seems to be all about surnames rather than given names, including e.g. Lance Berkman, whose family name was apparently at some point simplified from the Swedish-origin Björkman.
Enid Coleslaw, the teenager in the comic and the subsequent movie Ghost World, is Jewish. The name, though, is an anagram of the comic’s author, Daniel Clowes, so the Jewishness probably had little effect on the name choice.
Charlotte Guest was actually quite a remarkable woman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Charlotte_Guest
though unfortunately her WP article kicks off with this oldest-language-in-Europe-style nonsense:
Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, the oldest part of the so-called “Mabinogion” after Culhwch ac Olwen, dates from the eleventh century at the earliest (more likely the twelfth, but there’s some evidence that the scribes have sometimes miscopied/mistranscribed an original in Old Welsh orthography.) Culhwch ac Olwen probably does date from the eleventh century, though recent killjoys have suggested a more recent date (notably archaic language, though.)
I suppose it depends on what you call “literature.” And what you mean by “Britain.” A bit disrespectful of Alfred the Great, if you ask me, though.
I see that I mentioned this previously in 2022’s “Despot” thread, but the context there was different, i.e. title-names like Duke or Earl or Bar[r]on used as given names. But the fact relevant to this thread is that the full birth name of the great bebop pianist Duke Jordan (not Jewish, not white) was Irving Sidney Jordan, thus featuring a double dose from the MNII list. He was born in Brooklyn in 1922, so you’d think the “Jewish-sounding” associations of both names would have been obvious to his parents, but I suppose that for whatever reasons they didn’t view that as a disadvantage. (He was obviously neither the first nor the most prominent jazzman to acquire “Duke” as a nickname.)
I would think it hard to have a reasonable meaning for “prose literature of Britain” that excluded the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (dated to the early 8th century). I can understand the possible usefulness of a category that didn’t include prose works in Latin, but that phrasing is not how to define such a category.
@J.W.B.: Compare your list of Peter Friedmans to that of David Friedmans from the same era (noting that the judge whose birthdate isn’t given got his bachelor’s in 1971). I think “David” should have been on any list of Jewish-American masculine names from the 1950s or so, and “Peter” is more doubtful. (BTW, I know of only one relative of mine who there’s a Wikiparticle about, and his surname isn’t “Friedman”.)
And the list of Sadies has no one born in the first two-thirds of the 20th century, which is about the time I’d guess it was distinctively Jewish. More recently it’s gotten a revival.
@JWB:
Yes, I was going to rope in the Venomous Bead too, but thought that the wikipedian maybe thought “history” didn’t count as “literature.” (There’s Gildas, too, to say nothing of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. And lots of homilies and the like.)
I suppose the earlier bits of the “Mabinogion” might qualify as the first local British productions to have survived in that particular prose genre, viz prose romance/entertainment. I can’t offhand think of anything in Old English that fits the bill, though I wouldn’t be surprised if better-informed Hatters can.
You could make a much better argument for Welsh poetry as being proper-venerable-like. Some of Taliesin’s poems probably really do go back to Urien Rheged’s court poet, and parts of the Gododdin are likely genuwine seventh-century productions.
I can’t think of any Roman poets who actually composed their works in Britain. Unpoetical climate. (Shut up, Wordsworth.)
@JiE: If being called Julius makes you Jewish, why does being called Mark Anthony make you definitely not?
Being called Julius doesn’t make you Jewish (though there was one in my family), but “Julius” was probably overrepresented among American Jews because of the resemblance to “Yehudah”. Back then, “Judah” was too Jewish and making “Jude” a Jewish name would have been a lost cause.
“Mark” and “Anthony” were probably too Christian for a while, though that may have worn off for “Mark/Marc” before it did for “Anthony”. I can’t remember a Jewish Anthony or Tony near my age. But “Mark Anthony” didn’t correspond to any Hebrew names in particular. You could match it with Mordokhai Aharon or something, but that would be rare. I think just having two Hebrew given names wasn’t common. (Could be wrong.)
What, the Mabinogion doesn’t count as history? Are you accusing its tales of being fictitious, or something? That seems an anachronistic viewpoint.
I can’t remember a Jewish Anthony or Tony near my age
I have a Jewish relative (of roughly my age) called Tony …
the Mabinogion doesn’t count as history?
Of course it does. But it’s cunningly disguised as fiction, to throw the English off the scent.
The author of the Four Branches does a remarkably consistent job of excising all references to Christianity from the action (not so much from the dialogue.) And although the characters are presented as human (more or less), there’s a persistent feeling that you’re not quite being told what’s going on, exactly. Not that the narrator is bothered at all – they evidently just want to tell a good story.
The extant text of Beowulf is quite a bit older than that of the Mabinogion.
@Jerry F.: Let’s pick 1955 as representative of the decade. “David” was at the time the second-most-popular name for newborn boys in the U.S., being given to over 4.1% of that year’s crop. (There was more concentration back then – 2024’s second-most-popular boys’ name only got 1.1%.) That might well be more gentile baby Davids than baby Jewish boys of all names combined. Although I would certainly agree that David doesn’t seem like a *less* Jewish name for that cohort than Roger or the various other names on the list attributed to Warren Blatt. But there are only a small minority of the boys’ names in that year’s top 50 where it might seem mildly unexpected for them to be borne in a given instance by a Jewish possessor. (Beyond the frequently-mentioned John and maybe James, I might suggest Kevin, Terry, Patrick, Wayne, and Christopher, although all pretty tentatively. Probably Gerald also. Not sure about Keith and Raymond.)
The extant text of Beowulf is quite a bit older than that of the Mabinogion.
Sure, but it’s not prose. That was the (supposed) issue.
Dating mediaeval Welsh poetry is made (even) harder by the fact that there was no break in the literary tradition, so works that were quite certainly composed in the Old Welsh period were progressively gradually modernised by copyists, and have come down to us in a sort of Middle Welsh disguise: rather as if Beowulf were only extant in Middle English.
It’s dead easy to find Relics of Paganism© in the Four Branches (much more so than in Beowulf); whether the actual author thought of them as such is another matter altogether, though. Seems unlikely.
The comparison between Welsh and Bulgarian literature is apt. The Greeks burned down most of Middle Bulgarian manuscripts after they were were given authority of the Rum Millet by the Ottomans.
I forgot to add that Rudyard Kipling was actually named after the beauty spot Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, which his parents remembered with affection after their move to India.
There are plenty of non-Jewish men called David. Likewise there are plenty of non-Jewish women called Ruth. Neither David nor Ruth taken alone suggest to me that the person might be Jewish, but taken together, such as a brother and sister called David and Ruth, they do. Is there any reason to think this, or have I just been influenced by a particular example?
but taken together, such as a brother and sister called David and Ruth, they do
I and my two siblings form just such a set, and indeed a German au pair we had back in the sixties assumed that we were Jewish on that very basis, before actually meeting us (we all looked propaganda-poster Nordic as small children.)
OK, so it’s not just me. I’ve never worked as a German au pair.
There’s no shame in it. Nobody here would judge you for it.
Well, Ovid composed Tristia in a place that he thought had a miserable climate (not Britain, however).
Augustus was not vindictive enough to relegate him to somewhere that grim. (Not even in the empire at that point …)
I apologize for the length of this. On a site I hang out at I got tired of having to come up with counterexamples every time a Brit complained about Americans using last names as first names, as if it were an exclusively American thing, so I started keeping a list every time I came across a Brit (or someone else from the Anglosphere excluding North America) with a family name as their first name. Here it is, as of today:
1. Let’s start with some Prime Ministers:
Winston (named for Sir WC, father of the first Duke of Marlborough, whose mother was called Sarah Winston)
Neville
Stanley
Keir
Spencer (Compton and Perceval)
See also Ramsay, Gordon, and Bonar under middle names below.
2. I have seen all of these family names used as first names (by non-North-Americans) more than once:
Athol (Guy and Fugard, Australian and South African)
Aubrey*
Barry
Bramwell
Brandon
Bruce
Cecil
Clark
Clinton
Clive
Craig
Curtis
Dale
Darcy/D’Arcy
Denzil
Desmond
Digby
Donovan
Dougal*
Douglas
Eliot/Elliott
Elton
Finley
Ford (FMF, FMB, Ford Grey Earl of Tankerville)
Fraser/Frasier
Gary
Glenn
Graham/Graeme
Grant
Grayson
Hamilton
Harvey
Howard
Hunter
Irvine
Irving
Jarvis
Keith
Kingsley
Leigh
Lee
Lennox
Lester
Lindsay
Lloyd
Logan
Mason
Milton
Montagu/Montague
Murray
Nelson
Newton
Norman
Percy
Perry
Rodney
Ross
Rowan*
Russell
St. John
Scott
Sefton
Selwyn
Sheridan
Sidney/Sydney
Stanley
Stewart
Trevor
Vere
Vernon
Wallace/Wallis
Warren
Wayne
Woodrow
* Aubrey, Rowan, and Dougal were given names before they became family names, but their use as given names seems to have died out completely before being revived in modern times, presumably from the family name.
3. Maybe only in the West Indian community:
Byron
Daley
Duane
Gladstone (Cleophas Small)
Linton
Nelson
Wilson
4. As far as I know, these are one-offs:
Acton (Smee Ayrton)
Airey (Neave)
Aldous (Huxley)
Apsley (Cherry-Garrard)
Auckland (Colvin)
Bache (Cunard)
Bamber ( Gascoyne) (actually a two-off, father and son)
Banastre (Tarleton)
Bazett (Wetenhall Colvin)
Bonamy (Dobrée) (several in same family)
Blunden (Shadbolt)
Bryceson (Treharne)
Bulstrode (Whitelocke) (b 1605)
Clotworthy (Skeffington) (three generations with the same name)
Cloudesley (Shovell)
Clough (Williams-Ellis)
Compton (Mackenzie)
Conyers (Seymour)
Corelli (Barnett)
Coventry (Patmore)
Daines (Barrington)
Dawson (Turner)
Deane (Swift)
(Denholm) Elliot
Donovan (Leitch)
Erskine (Hamilton Childers) (Irish; son of Robert Erskine Childers)
Eveleigh (Nash)
Eyre (Crowe) (three-off but all in the same family)
Fitzroy (MacLean)
Ford (two-off: Ford Madox Brown and grandson Ford Madox Heuffer later FM Ford)
Forrest (Reid) (Irish)
Fulke (Greville)
Golding (Constable)
Goldsworthy (Lowes Dickinson)
Gonville (Bromhead)
Gonville (Bromhead)
Granville (Sharpe)
Grayson (Perry)
Greville (Janner)
Grey (Gowrie)
Hablot (Knight Browne)
Haden (Pentecost)
Halford (Mackinder)
Hallam (Tennyson)
Harbottle (Grimston)
Harley (Granville-Barker)
Harrison (Birtwhistle)
Hastings (Ismay)
Havelock (Ellis) (originated as a first name but after dying out became popular in the 19th century in honor of Sir Henry Havelock)
Hayley (Mills) (mother’s maiden name)
Heston (Blumenthat)
Hewlett (Johnson)
Homan (Potterton) (Irish)
Houston (Stewart Chamberlain)
Kinloch (Anderson)
Lascelles (Abercrombie)
Linnaeus (Tripe)
Mansfeldt (Findlay)
Marchamont (Needham)
Menzies (Campbell)
Milner (Gray)
Monckton (Hoffe) (Irish); one-off as a first name but see middle names
Monier (Williams) (two-off; father and son; son changed name to Monier Monier-Williams)
Mountstuart (Elphinstone
Muir (Matheon)
Muirhead (Bone)
Northcote (Thomas)
Orde (Wingate)
Pelham (Grenville Wodehouse)
Penry (Williams)
Pryce (Pryce-Jones)
Raglan (Squire)
Redvers (Buller)
Rhodes (Boyson)
Rhynwick (Williams)
Romilly (Jenkins)
Ruthven (Todd)
Sacheverell (Sitwell)
St. John (Ervine)
Sanderson (Jones)
Sheffield (Neave)
Standish (O’Grady) (Irish)
Stirling (Moss)
Thornton (Leigh Hunt)
Travers (Humphreys)
Tyson (Fury)
Vere (Gordon Childe) (Australian)
Wetenhall (Sneyd)
Wogan (Philipps)
Woronzow (Greig)
Woodes (Rogers)
5. Middle names, but used as given names by the person bearing them:
(John Ramsey) Allardyce Nicoll
(Harold) Athol Fugard (South African)
(Arthur) Bamber Gascoigne (not the same as Bamber Gascoyn, elder or younger)
(Herbert) Beerbohm Tree
(John) Beverley Nichols (Irish)
(Philip) Blake Morrison
(Andrew) Bonar Law (Canadian born)
(Patrick) Branwell Brontë
(John) Bulmer Hobson (Irish)
Jesse) Dickson Mabon
(Henry) Chapman Pincher
(Alfred) Duff Cooper
(Robert) Erskine Childers (Irish)
(William Matthew) Flinders Petrie
(Reginald Stephen) Garfield Todd (New Zealand-born Zimbabwean)
(Hubert Miles) Gladwyn Jebb
(Thomas) German Reed
(Edward) Gough Whitlam (Australian)
(James) Gordon Brown
(Thomas Henry) Hall Caine
(David) Hartley Coleridge
(John Henley) Heathcote Williams
(Edward) Hesketh Pearson
(William) Holman Hunt
(John) Hookham Frere
(John) Horne Tooke
(Edward) Hunter Davies
(James) Keir Hardie
(William) Kennedy Jones
(John) Langdon Down
(Peter) Locke King
(John) Marsden Jones
Stella Maria Sarah) Miles Franklin (female, Australian)
(George) Melville Cooper
(William) Menzies Campbell
(Richard) Monckton Milnes
(James) Muir Mathieson
(James) Ramsay MacDonald
(Peter) Reyner Banham
(Henry) Rider Haggard
(Peter) Ritchie Calder
(Maboza) Ritchie Robertson
(William) Robertson Smith
(Margaret) Rumer Godden (female)
(Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
(John) Rutherford Alcock
(George) Warwick Deeping
(Denis) Sefton Delmer
(Thimas) Stamford Raffles
(Margaret) Storm Jameson (female)
(Percy) Wyndham Lewis
Harry) St John Philby
(William Grattan) Tyrone Power (Irish; ancestor of the American actor)
(William) Saumarez Smith
(George) Warwick Deeping
(Henry) Wickham Steed
(William) Wilkie Collins
(William James) Walker Todd
(Theobald) Wolfe Tone (Irish)
6. Fictional and pseudonymous. I have left the better-known ones unidentified as an exercise for the class:
Acton
Currer
Ellis
Fitzwilliam
Mycroft
Rawdon
Robinson
Soames
Sexton
Sherlock
Sweeney
Barrington (Erle) (Palliser novels)
Blount (Constantine) (Hardy, Two on a Tower)
Butler (Cornbury) (Trollope, Rachel Ray)
Darnley (Otter) (John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent)
Darsie (Latimer) (Walter Scott, Redgauntlet)
Donovan (Anderson) (Martha Quest)
Jellaby (Postlethwaite, George du Maurier cartoons)
Hareton (Earnshaw, Wuthering Heights)
Hindley (ditto)
Legge (Wilson) (Palliser novels)
Manning (Coles) (Tommy Hambledon)
Mounser (Green, Trollope, The American Senator, explained as his mother’s maiden name: “I don’t see why it should not be as good a Christian name as Willoughby or Howard.” Part Three, ch xxi.)
Nayland (Smith) (Fu Manchu)
(James) Parker (Pyne)
Rockingham (Napier, in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women)
St John (Rivers, Jane Eyre)
Wilkins (Micawber)
7. Mostly women:
Ashley/Ashleigh
Beverley
Evelyn
Joyce
Leslie/Lesley
Shelley
Shirley
Taylor
Tracy
And see Storm Jameson, Rumer Godden, Miles Franklin, and Hayley Mills above
A useful compilation; thanks for sharing it.
While Granville and Greville were tantalizingly close, England also gave us Grenville Collins, one of the original co-managers of the Kinks, who died earlier this year and who back in 1970 was immortalized in one of Ray Davies’ songs bitching and moaning about the iniquities of the music biz and the contracts that one might have imprudently signed.*
There was separately an n-less Greville Collins (1907-1972) whose contribution to the rock and roll business was indirect via his son Phil.
*”Robert owes half to Grenville
Who, in turn, gave half to Larry, who
Adored my instrumentals**
And so he gave half to a foreign publisher
He took half the money
That was earned in some far distant land
Gave back half to Larry
And I end up with half of goodness knows what”
**If you think you’ve got a better slant-rhyme for “Grenville” than “instrumentals” I’d like to hear it.
“Zaentz can’t dance, but he’ll steal your money…”
@hat: oh it’s not quite as bad as that song, but it’s still pretty bad. In both cases the songwriters did not have optimal rapport with their respective muses while their minds were clouded with anger over financial disputes with the suits. I’m not saying financial-disputes-with-the-suits can’t potentially be a subject of high art, but most otherwise talented folks don’t have the knack.
There’s an old folk tale (Russian?) about a peasant who is offered whatever he wants to wish for by a genie with the understanding that the genie will automatically give the peasant’s neighbor (whom he loathes) twice as much of the same blessing, so the peasant thinks it over and then asks to be made blind in one eye. That’s more or less what Fogerty ended up doing to his own talent in order to spite Zaentz (with an unhealthy desire to spite his own brother and other former bandmates sort of mixed in as well).
Perhaps using surnames as given names is like calling association football “soccer”: in the US everybody does it, whereas in the UK the elite did it even before the US, but the masses have never liked it.
Back to the overall theme of this thread. I was just by chance thinking of one of the very-weird shows we saw as kids on Saturday morning tv in the early Seventies due to the wacky creative style of Sid and Marty Krofft. Pretty Jewish-sounding names for some show-biz guys, whether or not they work with surreal puppets, right? But as Marty told an interviewer when asked about his Jewish background: “Zero!” he replied gleefully. “I’m Greek and Hungarian. But everyone thinks I’m Jewish, and in Los Angeles, that never hurts.” And indeed wikipedia advises (I’d never looked into this before) that when the brothers were born in Montreal they were originally named Cydus and Moshopopoulos Yolas. I don’t have enough prior familiarity with either of those first names to know if those are idiosyncratic transliterations or the usual way you’d do it.
I’m not saying financial-disputes-with-the-suits can’t potentially be a subject of high art, but most otherwise talented folks don’t have the knack.
The undisputed champion here is, of course, the Clash, with their immortal “Complete Control” (though there the dispute was not primarily financial).
In my case it’s Athel (short for Athelstan), so it’s a genuine given name. It’s quite often mis-spelt as Athol, especially by South Africans, where it’s a surprisingly common name (not just Athol Fugard). The first time I was in South Africa I was at a social gathering, and after replying to a question of what my name was, I commented that it was not a common name. To that a girl of about 16 said that on the contrary there were four in her school.
@hat: Yeah Complete Control’s totally different because it captures that moment of youthful/naive excitement when the musicians genuinely don’t care about the money as such and are annoyed that the suits do care about the money. The other two are about the later period when the musicians suddenly do very much care about the money and get mad about how much of it went to the suits rather than themselves.
Also Gertraud.
Yeah Complete Control’s totally different because it captures that moment of youthful/naive excitement when the musicians genuinely don’t care about the money as such and are annoyed that the suits do care about the money. The other two are about the later period when the musicians suddenly do very much care about the money and get mad about how much of it went to the suits rather than themselves.
Fair enough, but I’ll take any occasion to link to “Complete Control.”
The logic is irrefutable.
I had a colleague named Morris in 1969-70 who was addressed as Moyshe by our Jewish fellow workers. I would guess that he was born around 1920.
I think it was about 1990 that I read of an overheard conversation in the New York Times’s Metropolitan Diary. One older lady mentions to another that she had been to the bris of her grandson Shlomo. “Shlomo. That’s an unusual name in this day and age.” “Yes. He was named for his late uncle Scott.”
@Y: According to Wikipedia, Arthur “Harpo” Marx’s Name Assigned At Birth was Adolph, which he disliked and changed. It doesn’t sound any more Jewish than “Arthur”, especially now.
@CuConnacht: That’s an impressive list! However, speaking of Arthurs, Arthur Neville Chamberlain belongs in the middle-name section (Wikip again). I have doubts about some other items and might be back with suggestions.
>they were originally named Cydus and Moshopopoulos Yolas
That’s taking the use of surnames as given names awfully far.
Treating first and middle names as separate categories that follow separate conventions is itself a very anglophone phenomenon. (Plus Denmark, but differently, AFAIK.)
Thanks, Jerry Friedman. I have corrected the mother list. I noticed some duplications after I posted which I have also corrected.
And I have added a couple that were mentioned here. Thanks, all.
Treating first and middle names as separate categories that follow separate conventions is itself a very anglophone phenomenon. (Plus Denmark, but differently, AFAIK.)
With the exception in some Continental European languages that for men Maria or Marie is far more likely as a middle name than as a first name. For women, in Spanish at least, José is far more likely as a middle name than as a first name.
There is no acceptable way to pronounce Van Gogh in English.
@J.W.B.: If you think you’ve got a better slant-rhyme for “Grenville” than “instrumentals” I’d like to hear it.
Level, devil, Neville? (TIL about Neville Neville.) Anvil? Eventful? A denful (of cubs)?
In German I’m used to [faŋˈg̊ɔxː] – so close and yet so far…
@Cuconnacht: wow! that’s a list to rival new england puritan death records for glorious onomastic implausibility!
and, under (2), an impressive reminder to myself of how many names that i think of primarily as given/first names are originally surnames (brandon, el(l)iot(t), gary, and wayne were ones that caught my eye).
@CuConnacht:
Cecil was originally a given name, so it could use an asterisk.
Fulk and Fulke seem to have started and always been most common as given names. There’s a 12th-century English St. Fulk, assuming he existed.
I’m not sure what your criteria are, but you could add the spelling Stuart. (I just learned about “Captain Calamity”.)
You could add Mackenzie, which goes back to Sir Mackenzie Edwin Stewart Chalmers (1847–1927) and is apparently popular now.
I like the Shlomo joke.
@Jerry Friedman:
Thanks again!
@CuConnacht: I was surprised Warwick Davis wasn’t on the list. His sister-in-law is also a Hayley.
There is no acceptable way to pronounce Van Gogh in English.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything other than “Van Go,” and nobody raises an eyebrow at it. But this is the US; things may be different elsewhere.
A wikipedia footnote on Vinnie Van G.: “The pronunciation of Van Gogh varies in both English and Dutch. Especially in British English it is /væn ˈɡɒx/ van GOKH[1] or /væn ˈɡɒf/ van GOF.[2] American dictionaries list /væn ˈɡoʊ/ ⓘ van GOH, with a silent gh, as the most common pronunciation.[3] In the dialect of Holland, it is [ˈfɪnsɛnt fɑŋ ˈxɔx] ⓘ, with a voiceless v and g. He grew up in Brabant and used Brabant dialect in his writing; his pronunciation was thus likely [vɑɲ ˈʝɔç], with a voiced v and palatalised g and gh (see “Hard and soft G in Dutch”). In France, where much of his work was produced, it is [vɑ̃ ɡɔɡ(ə)].[4]”
The digraph “gh” (historical yogh) is famously one of the least predictable in current English orthography. “Bough” is a domestic example of a word where it at present represents no phoneme at all, just as in (American) “Van Gogh.” And there are others, like “sleigh” and “sigh,” with “borough” having the same vowel (in my idiolect, at least …) as “Van Gogh.”
Which vowel? Or do you pronounce them both identically?
“Van Gogh” and “borough” both have final-syllable GOAT for me, or at least can – the one in “borough” can get reduced to schwa in certain settings, but not in formal register and I think I am more likely to use it in formal-register contexts.
-ough
I say /væŋ’xɔx/, on account of /x/ being part of my English idiolect. Still not very Dutch …
I think somebody misinterpreted velar & uvular as palatal & velar here. Holland definitely uses [χ], not [x], and I’ve heard [x] and [ɣ] in Belgium, FWTW.
French needs its own Geoff Lindsey! The an sound is not back, but central; and while it is unrounded in Canada, it is fully rounded in France and has been for many decades.
Rawdon Crawley in ‘Vanity Fair’ (from Cuconnacht’s list) comes from a family who named their sons after famous political figures (Pitt senior and junior; forebears named Walpole and John Churchill are mentioned). His own namesake, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings, must have been much better-known in Thackeray’s time than he is today.
From a U.S. vantage, you can either say “Van Go” and be an ignorant monolingual American, or say “Fan Khokh” or such and be a pretentious snob. Best to stick to Leonardo or Picasso.
Wannabe snob Charlotte Haze, played by Shelley Winters in the first Lolita movie, says “Van Gok”, unnaturally emphasized, so as to have the worst of both worlds. VVN didn’t care for the artist, either. I wonder if that line was his idea.
Danish [fan’gɔg̊]. van (and von) seem to be immune to place assimilation, but I think there is (progressive) voicing assimilation on the first /g̊/.
On the topic of surnames adapted to serve as middle names and/or first names, two unrelated anecdotes from southern Africa.
1. In yesterday’s election results, “Namibian politician Adolf Hitler Uunona … retained his seat in his small northern constituency yet again despite his controversial name.” (He claims his father may have had a seriously incomplete understanding of the record of the namesake when he chose the name.)
2. Given my own surname I was intrigued to learn from the label on the back that one of the bottles of wine I’ve pulled off the shelf for consideration as finalists for our family’s Thanksgiving dinner was made by South African cousins named Bruwer Raats and Gavin Bruwer Slabbert. (It’s a cabernet franc from the Stellenbosch region.) I don’t know if Bruwer for Brouwer is just how they do it in Afrikaans or it’s a family-specific idiosyncrasy.
I may have told this before, but when my daughter was a student at Stellenbosch University, she got romantically involved with an engineering student whose family owned (but no longer ran) a vineyard. Back home for Christmas, she noticed that the South-African shelf at our local branch of Polet read like a list of family friends, and she had faces to many of the names.
Most intriguing.
@JWB: Sarah certainly was seen as a Jewish name in the first half of the 20th century in Germany; when the Nazis forced an obligatory second name on all Jews who had non-Jewish first names, in order to make them immediately recognizable as Jewish, they chose Israel for men and Sarah for women.
@Hans. Yes indeed, which underscores how German onomastic culture is unlike Anglo-American onomastic culture, because the Reformation did *not* lead to any boom in Old Testament names given to Protestant children in the former. “Israel” has unlike Sarah faded from any prominence as a Protestant/gentile name in more recent centuries, yet my people do have examples from earlier times such as the great WASP folk hero Israel Putnam (1718-1790), who famously killed the last wild wolf in Connecticut in a story that any competent anthropologist would immediately take to be an ahistorical bit of mythology, prompting a theory about what it really meant since it obviously wasn’t literally true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Putnam_Wolf_Den
Most intriguing: I should install Praat innit.
I installed it many years ago and never even opened it. Do better than that.
Pietism did create translations of at least two OT names (Erdmann “Adam”, Erdmut(h)e “Eve”), but the originals were already pretty popular AFAIK, and the rest of Pietist creativity went into other directions: good old Germanic theophoric names with Gott- or Christ- instead of, say, Ing-, and hortative names like those of some early English Puritans (Gottlob “Praise-God“), though never with more than two elements. Long list here, scroll past the placenames.
“Israel” has unlike Sarah faded from any prominence as a Protestant/gentile name in more recent centuries, …
We heard (briefly) from an Israel just the other day.
German poet Sarah Kirsch chose “Sarah” as her nom-de-plume in memory of the murdered Jews.
I just looked up Sahra [sic] Wagenknecht. Turns out she’s actually a زهراء Zahrā’; her father is from Iran. (And she is actually née Sarah, but officially changed her name to reflect the original intention when she joined the Bundestag.)
Back to “Milton, thou shouldst be …”: a friend of mine posted on facebook a photo of a museum display collecting old campaign buttons that were a partial sample of the candidates who strove to become the 1976 Democratic nominee for president of the U.S. There were quite a lot of them that year because the field seemed wide-open and certainly the eventual winner (Jimmy Carter) had himself started from a position of obscurity and had been nobody’s idea of a favorite or front-runner. Anyway, one of the candidates whose name I had once known but had not had occasion to think about for some years was the Hon. Milton Shapp (1912-1994), who was at the time the Governor of Pennsylvania.
He was (and this I hadn’t known previously) born Milton Shapiro, but back in the 1930’s had changed his surname to Shapp, reportedly “to avoid prejudice” by having what he hoped would be a less Jewish-sounding name. Which for me raised the question of how successful such a strategy could really have been if he retained the first name Milton. He was an Army officer during WW2 so may have been one of the Miltons in the dataset referenced in the OP.