Writer's Block: Same Name

[browngirl]

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Not both and last, but this reminds me of the Story of my Given Name.



Long ago, during the magical time known as the 1970s, in a mystical land known as the Bronx, lived two young Jamaican immigrants who were married to each other, very much in love, and so poor they could only afford one magazine at a time. They were cuddled up together reading their magazine and they read about an African author, whose daughter had a name they liked very much, and they decided that if they had a daughter they would bestow upon her this special name.

They had a baby, which was a girl, to whom they gave this name, and who grew up to be me. Ever after, when I unroll my full name and people blink at the cascade of syllables, I say, "I was named during the '70s", and they laugh and nod in understanding.

(Also, some years later I met a woman a few years my senior who might possibly be the person I'm named after.)

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

That's a great story. Thanks for sharing it.

In answer to the question, no, I've never met anyone named Bill Gawne who's not related to me. In fact, I'm pretty sure every other Bill Gawne in the whole world *is* related to me.

[tendyl.livejournal.com]

I've never met anyone else with my full given name (or any of the iterations thereof). Now, I'd be astonished if I met someone else with my last name (besides my daughter).

[cereta.livejournal.com]

I like this story!

[awfief.livejournal.com]

I find it unlikely that I'll ever meet a Sheeri Kritzer or Sheeri Cabral.

[mtgat]

Ever after, when I unroll my full name and people blink at the cascade of syllables, I say, "I was named during the '70s", and they laugh and nod in understanding.

Hee! I know several people who do this. :)

While I have two of the most common names in the U.S. (especially for my age group) I have never actually met another person with the same combination. There's lots of us who come up on Google searches, though, and I like it that way. ;)

[gingicat]

There are a gazillion Rachel S. Silvermans and Rachel Sommers. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person with my chosen full legal name, though. :)

[jenny_evergreen]

Even horrible awful parents manage to hit it out of the park sometimes, and yours sure did it with your name. I don't think I've ever met a name I liked more, really.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

Bwah ha haa! You really think I'm going to find someone else in the world with my last name? Heck, even my dad's brothers mostly all spelled their last names differently! Good ole Polish name, and it was spelled differently on each child's birth certificate, dependant upon the background (Polish/non-Polish) of the midwife at the time of birth. Y'see, Grandma didn't speak English. There were 8 children in my dad's family, (7 boys) and I think a total of 5 different spellings of their last names.

[ckd]

I doubt there's anyone with my exact first/middle/last, but boy are there ever a bunch of folks with the same first and last name. (Plenty of whom have the same middle initial.)

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

(-:

My parents were born, grew up, and met each other in the Bronx.

[kshandra]

iceblink and I have the same first and middle names. This is perhaps less coincidental than it sounds, as easily half of the women I've spoken to who were born between '69 and '71 have that same middle name.

[hand2hand.livejournal.com]

cool.

[tsjafo.livejournal.com]

That is a wonderful story. I think your name is beautiful.

[redbird]

I was fairly sure I was the only Vicki Rosenzweig in the United States, if not the world, until I got email from another. (Which reminds me, I have an unanswered message from her.) No relation, not even by marriage (she got the surname from her now-ex-husband, and kept it after the divorce, but he wasn't related to me as far as I can figure out).

[sethg]

Once every few years I respond to some email from a stranger and tell them "there are two Seth Gordons, and I'm the other one".

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

My husband is a computer scientist and a musician.

There are at least three other people with his same first and last name*, and two of them are prominent computer scientists and one of them is a prominent director of music videos.

Yes, he gets the other guys' email. No word on whether they get his.

*(not to mention his uncle of the same first and last name, which confused me at first until it turned out that Uncle Sam's Hebrew name, which is his actual legal name, is Shlomo, and my husband's Hebrew name is Shmuel, so apparently this doesn't violate the proscription against children sharing the name of a living relative)


As for my name, my last name is bog-standard (pun intended), but my first name used to be unusual--though now it is very common for little girls, which kind of messes with my head.

Even so, there is someone else in the Boston area named Julie S., who works in PR, and back when I used to do that too, we used to get confused calls from each other's clients.

The weirdest thing about name-synchrony was the time when, as a kid, I was on vacation with my parents and we went to church in the vacation town, and among the memorial prayers was someone with my name. I wish I'd found out who that lady was.

My middle name is unusual; it's both my grandmothers' first names smooshed together.

I also had a great-greataunt with a unique name: Harrinina. It was supposed to be "Harriet Nina" but either the priest or her father (or both) was drunk, and her mother was recovering from complications of pregnancy so by the time she was back in the picture, Aunt Mynie had been "Harrinina" for months.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

i like the story :)

[rosefox]

1) Does rosefox8 count?

2) Does fiction count?

[claudia603.livejournal.com]

That's an adorable and awesome story! :)

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

I've never met anyone else with the same first name/last name combination as me. I know they exist, though, because Student Health down here accidentally mixed up our medical records that one time (it was all sorted out, thank ghu).

Also, also... the first time I went to vote, ever, I went up to the desk and was asked my name. I gave first name, last name. "Oh, is your middle name Anne or Erica?" It's Erica. It was almost Anne. (I was named after my aunt Anne Erica, my mother's youngest sister. Mum decided against making my middle name Anne on the grounds that the sister of my father's that she hated most (he has ten of them) has the middle name Anne and "I didn't want that bitch thinking I named the baby after her." Ah, family politics.)

My first name is an awfully common one among women around my age, thanks to That Bloody Beatles Song.

yes and no

[andreas_schaefer]

Known of - under my name [Andreas Schaefer] I am virtually invisible on the net because of all the others.
In my year at school there was a girl with just the s missing from my first name [ difference in German between male and female form ] and we used to get each others rollcalls occasionally when someone assumed the missing s or the sex marker must be a typo.
My Grandfather [ who I never met , died in 1900] had the same name [ not the same middle names but THAT would be unlikely ].

Translated/Americanized my name would be Andrew Shepherd and there must be a lot of those. Not quite as many as Joe Smith, but ample.

[lferion]

To the best of my knowledge everyone on the planet who shares my last name (in several spellings) is related in some manner -- it's not at all common. That said, I have in fact met another firstname-lastname exact match who is a Very Distant relative (no apparent connection back at least 3 generations).

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

That's a great story!

As for my name... There are a *lot* of Pat Greenes out there, both male and female. I've never known any personally, but ... In the early days of email, I used to get a lot of misdirected email at 'patgreene@aol.com' (I no longer have that address). My favorite was "Hey Pat, Julie and I can't use the Super Bowl tickets after all -- do you want them?" I emailed them back saying I was not the person they were looking for, but I'd be very glad to take the tickets off their hands. They sent me a very nice email saying sorry, in that case they had other plans for them. Rats.

When I went in to have my sleep study, they pulled the wrong file -- someone who had the same first, middle, and last name and the same *birthdate*. They, however, lived in an entirely different part of the state.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I've found some people with my first and last name on Google. One seems to be an accoustical engineer in Australia, one's an audiologist at some hospital or clinic, one is a music producer in England. All seem to be on the technical side of sound, oddly.

I tend to have more web presence than most of my namesakes, due to my reputation and books in model rocketry.

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

Reitman is a rare name. I've run across a few.

[ailbhe]

I'm the only one of me I've ever found. And I looked.

[ookpik.livejournal.com]

My first name was fairly common among kids my age, but seems to be quite rare in later generations; my surname is a less-standard spelling of a moderately common one. But according to a website that I found a while back, I'm the only one in the US with this combination. (I'll post the link if I remember the website.)

An old friend/ex-boyfriend (very common first name, don't know about the last name but I haven't encountered it except in his family) moved to a new house and found that the neighbor a few houses down not only shared both of his names, but had almost the identical middle name (one of them doubled a consonant in the middle, the other didn't). As you might imagine, they got each other's mail all the time.

[sage]

And everyone I've unrolled your name for has responded with, "Oh, wow, what a lovely name! Where are her parents from?"

*snugs you much*

[bearfairie.livejournal.com]

:) yay for your lovely name :) I love name stories.

I don't think there's anyone in the world with the same combo of first/last name as me. My first name... I'm technically named after a pizza oven. I was also the first born of young 20-somethings in the 70s. My name... there's a province in Italy that, among other things, is the home of a company that manufactures pizza ovens, and the company named itself for the province. If you go into any pizza parlor in the 5 boros in NY you'll find my name. Kinda hilarious :).