H-A-L-L-O-W-E-E-N

via Wikipedia

It's Halloween and my fellow name bloggers have done a superb job at blogging about Halloween names (check out the name blog list to the right)! So, what do I do? I list names that include the letters H-A-L-L-O-W-E-E-N:

Alen
Alene
Alon
Allen
Allene
Allon
Ean
Ela
Elen
Ella
Elle
Ellen
Elon
Eon
Hal
Hale
Helen
Lane
Lea
Leah
Lee
Leena
Len
Lena
Leo
Leon
Lew
Lon
Lona
Lowel
Neal
Neela
Nel
Nela
Nell
Neola
Noel
Noela
Noelle
Nola
Olen
Owen

That was fun! I'm sure there's more... can you see any I missed?

Happy Halloween!

The Starbucks Conundrum

via Starbucks

I originally posted about this on Facebook, but I thought it would be fun to blog about it as well. It's called the Starbucks Conundrum. You give your order and your name to the barista and hope he/she gets the order right AND spells your name right. Or is that just me? As you can guess, my name is often misspelled. It doesn't damper my day because I'm used to it, but my day is definitely brightened when they get it right.

So, in comes Instagram. The online phone picture phenomenon is fun to participate in as well as look through. The other day, I typed "names" into the search box and found these goodies: #namespelledwrong, #namespeltwrong, and #namespelledright.  A lot of these pictures were of Starbucks cups. Little did the baristas know their mistakes would be broadcast around the world of Instagram. Here is what I've found in the "wrong" category (actual spelling is in parenthesis):

Megan (Meghan)
Sabastian (Sebastian)
Kyra (Kera)
Jeff (Geoff)
Danica (Danikka)
Sierra (Ciarra)
Tobas (Tobias)
Tricia (Trisha)
Kristin (Kristyn)
Jordan (Jordyn)
Caressa (Carissa)
Cathy (Kathi)
Marielle (Maurielle)
Shelbey (Shelbee)
Zoey (Zoe)
Emely (Emily)
Madeline (Madalyn)
Shelbie (Shelby)
Loure (Laura)
Candiace (Candace)
Kely (Kelly)
Jordan (Jourdan)
Lizzie (Lizzy)
Ellenor (Eleanor)
Christy (Christie)
Lyann (Leanne)
Alisha (Alycia)
Tarry (Terri)
Madolyn (Madeline)

You can't blame some of the baristas, but others probably just didn't care.

And the names of the people who had their day brightened:
Katelyn
Keirsten
Lindsey
Sydney
Richelle
Rahil
Nikki
Teresa
Stefanie
Haley
Jamie
Devin

It's interesting, right? I'm sure a lot of these are just flukes, but that's what makes it so special.

Oh, to work at Starbucks. Think of the plethora of names you would hear as a barista. Though, I would probably be fired after the first rush hour due to my asking each customer how to spell their name and then possibly asking them for their name story. ;)

Has your name been misspelled a lot? What are the most common mistakes?

Diverted by a Name: Hollis

Hollis, New Hampshire via Wikipedia

The town of Hollis, New Hampshire was named after Thomas Hollis, a wealthy benefactor of Harvard University. Actually, the town name has been Hollis exclusively since 1815... before that date, since its inception in 1746, it was Holles after Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle. Starting in 1775, it was both names, but Hollis eventually won out. Several other towns in the United States are named Hollis, and the surname is heard frequently.

What about Hollis as a given name? I admit when I was first asked to look into this name (a thanks goes to Jacque for the request!), I thought it was a girl name. Possibly because of the "holl" in the beginning that made me think of Holly. In fact, Hollis means "lives near holly bushes" so I wasn't too far off. But the name is both a masculine and feminine one, with a stronger history in the United States as a name for boys. It was in the top 1000 as a boy name from 1880 until 1974 (peaking at #292 in 1908), while it was only in the top 1000 as a girl name from 1948 until 1955 (peaking at #772 in 1953). As a boy name it remained in the 300s from the turn of the century until 1935, when it gradually began to fall in the rankings. In 2011, 101 boys were given the name Hollis versus 60 girls. All that to say, it seems to weigh on the side of masculine.

Hollace is an interesting variant that is similar to Wallace (whose variant Wallis was made famous by a female celebrity). Other alternatives include Holles, Holless, Holliss, Hollys, Hollyes, Hollies, Holleis, Holyss and even Hollister. Similar names would be Holly, Holland, Heloise, Haley, and Halsey.

Known Hollises:

Hollis Caswell - an American educator

Hollis Robbins - an American scholar

Hollis Mason - a fictional character, part of the Watchmen comic books

Hollis Woods - a fictional character, Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff

What do you think of Hollis? Do you see it as a boy or girl name?




Info from www.thinkbabynames.com and www.behindthename.com.

Famous Surnames

Joe DiMaggio via Wikipedia

As I was going through the list of names from 2011 for my post on boys with girl names, I noticed a lot of great "named after famous people" names! Of course, some of these kids could have been named after family members and not the famous people with the same name, or their parents just chose the name because they liked it and didn't know or care about the celebrity, but some can't help but think of the celebrity when hearing the name, so I thought I would take a look at them anyway.

Being a baseball fan, Dimaggio is a name that stuck out to me right away. The Baltimore Orioles are my team, which means I hate severely dislike the New York Yankees, but certain past and present Yankee players are highly respected in my book. Joe DiMaggio is one of them, and Lou Gehrig is another. Pat Neshek, relief pitcher for the Oakland Athletics, and his wife recently suffered the sudden loss of their newborn baby, a boy named Gehrig John. I may be a little biased, but I think baseball players provide some of the best honorary names for babies.

Other famous people (possibly) honored are authors, artists, musicians, models, athletes, designers, philosophers, newscasters, criminals, television and movie celebrities, and politicians (although I did skip President(ial) Names, since I already wrote on them). I also only took into account the names that were spelled exactly like the celebrity.

Here are a list of the names that caught my eye, along with the number of babies born with the name in 2011:

Amadeus 35 (Not his surname, but still very linked to Mozart.)
Aniston 179
Arden 175, 72
Aristotle 23
Armani 516, 377
Austen 147, 28 (Could be a variant of Austin, but I choose to think some of these are after the author Jane, especially the girls.)
Beckham 356, 5
Berra 6
Brando 53
Brinkley 71
Brolin 13
Bronte 13
Browning 9
Cagney 5
Capone 5
Cheney 5 (Do you think this is possibly another spelling for Shanae?  If so, could be a reason to stay away from variant spellings, especially if you wouldn't like people to think your daughter is named after the former VP.)
Chesney 66, 6
Clancy 14, 13
Coltrane 13
Crawford 33
Crockett 8
Crosby 301, 24
Cruise 11
Daly 10
Darwin 291, 5
Dempsey 67, 25
Dillinger 36
Dimaggio 8
Dorsey 5
Fielder 6
Fitzgerald 7
Gable 7
Gabor 5
Garland 21, 6
Garner 12
Gehrig 27
Getty 5
Grisham 6
Guthrie 12
Hanson 39
Harlow 462, 13
Hendrix 200, 14
Hogan 29
Hughes 11
Huston 18
Hutton 16, 6
Iverson 20
Jenner 50
Jeter 37
Jolie 367
Joplin 14
Keaton 802, 57
Kepler 7
Kingsley 196, 33
Kipling 8
Lambert 6
Landry 284, 212
Larson 51
Lennon 302, 112
Lennox 262, 44
Lofton 10
Lovell 17
Macarthur 10
Maguire 21, 5
Malone 7, 5
Manning 22
Marino 16
Mattingly 23, 6
Mays 7, 5
Mccartney 13, 7
Monet 55
Monroe 141, 42 (I am including this due to Marilyn Monroe, not the president, especially since the majority are girls.)
Napoleon 20
Newman 6
Newton 14
Nobel 9
Olivier 77
Olsen 10
Patterson 11
Patton 50, 7
Powell 6
Presley 1384, 123
Ptolemy 6
Reeve 33
Reeves 12
Reiner 5
Rembrandt 5
Reynolds 7, 5
Reznor 14
Ricci 5
Ripken 9
Ritter 11
Robinson 48
Rollins 7
Romano 8
Romney 5
Rooney 43, 6
Rourke 9
Sanders 14
Sandler 5
Shaffer 5
Slater 57
Socrates 7
Spartacus 6
Stiles 11
Stockton 45
Swayze 26, 5
Tennyson 34, 15
Thatcher 164
Theron 87
Thurman 10
Tierney 89
Tyson 1370, 5
Wagner 5
Whitaker 18
Whitman 24
Wilder 62
Wyland 11
Zeppelin 20

Other baseball notables: Catcher 11; Dodger 7; Fenway 5; Shea 171, 148; Wrigley 25, 14; Yogi, 7. And I wouldn't be a loyal Orioles fan if I didn't mention Camden. Most non-baseball fans wouldn't see a connection, but if your name is Camden and you are from the Baltimore area, you were most likely named after the Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

Which famous surname would you use?

Romancing Miss Brontë

I'm on vacation! It's a beach vacation, which means I can sit and read a book. The book I chose to read is Romancing Miss Brontë by Juliet Gael, and of course it has inspired me to write about names.

Romancing Miss Brontë is historical fiction about Charlotte Brontë and her sisters, Emily and Anne. After doing some research on the Brontë family, I found that Emily is the only one listed that had a middle name, Jane. The three sisters also had two older sisters who died from tuberculosis, and their names were Maria and Elizabeth. A great sibset of sisters if I have ever heard one. Their brother's name was Patrick Branwell, which was their father's name and their mother's maiden name (they called him Branwell).

While the names of the siblings are alone perfectly blog-worthy, what really caught my eye was the nickname Charlotte's sisters called her: Tally. I am not sure if this is the author's creation, or if the sisters really called her Tally... if anyone knows I would love to hear! I had never heard that as a nickname for Charlotte. Charlie, Lottie, Lotta, Carly, Carla are the ones I can come up with, but never Tally. Tally, besides being a name in its own right, could be a nickname for Tallulah, Thalia, Talicia, or even Natalie.

That leads me to pronunciation. Are they pronouncing it like the word tally or like taw-lee, which would go with the sound of that last syllable in Charlotte? Like Lottie but switching the "t" and the "l"? I wonder, but the spelling makes it seem like they are saying it like the word tally. Again, not really sure how that came about, but definitely an interesting tidbit.

Besides the sisters, there are the males in Charlotte's life.  Her father, Patrick (who is Irish), and her two love interests, Arthur and George. Wonderfully common names for England in the 1800s. But another set of interesting names are the girls' pen names: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. They are surnames that use their same initials: Charlotte was Currer (the name she used to publish Jane Eyre), Emily was Ellis (the name she used to publish Wuthering Heights), and Anne was Acton (the name she used to publish Agnes Grey). Currer is a variant of Currier, a tradesname from one who curries leather. Ellis is a name we are familiar with, as it is currently ranked #723 in the United States, and it is similar in root to the name Elijah. Acton means "oak tree settlement" and would be related to the name Oakley.

I love how books (and real life characters) make me delve into names that I would not have considered otherwise. If I were not on vacation, I might try to delve a little more, but I'll leave it to you for now. As a side question, I've often wondered what pen name I would create to publish fabulous novels. Do you know?