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I'd tell people my middle name was "S" too if I were a boy middlenamed Sue. How do you do?!
Harry "Cool S" Truman
Hairy Ass
S and a dot apparently.
Have an old friend/colleague with the last name Oh, share the same first name, so at work we would always say, John S., John D, John O type of deal, for some reaosn it would keep me wondering if we were really saying Oh or O. For him. (John isn't really the first name, just an example)
I had a friend like this in college. His name was AJ. That's it. Just the letters.
Everyone in the department spent ages trying to guess what it stood for. I managed to glance his ID when we got lunch together once. His name was just AJ. There weren't even periods marking it as an abbreviation.
Still haven't told anyone though
Did you call him Aj or A.J?
Reminds me of the character BJ in M*A*S*H. Named after his parents, Bee and Jay
My stoner friend's incredibly, unbelievably stupid girlfriend has kids from a previous relationship named AJ, BJ, and CJ.
you have now made me suspect they are not abbreviations.
Names only an ancient roman could appreciate.
Assuming those are in sequence, sucks to be the middle kid
sucks to be the middle kid
I see what you did there.
I used to work with a guy that was from China. He only had a first in a last name. He was going to college here and the college required everyone to have a middle initial as part of their login. They just used his last initial as his middle initial.
Wait does everyone there have a middle name? I'm Dutch and I don't have a middle name. I figured that was quite common also in the English speaking world
My grandfather and father dont have a middle name.
Both Sicilian (Father born in the U.S though)
The famous poet Edgar Poe also didn't have a middle name
He does, it's Allan
I have two. You can borrow one for a while.
Not that I'm aware of Gerry F. Flap.
He's the only person I've known here in almost 50 years without a middle name. It's quite possible other people haven't had a middle name but it's never come up.
I knew that middle names are common in the US but I didn't know it's so deep in the culture
One of those things that’s just normal so we don’t talk about it I guess.
Is a middle name mandatory for you?
I think so, when immigrants get IDs in the US I believe they choose/are given a middle name
Not true, I am a naturalized US citizen, and don't have a middle name - it was never an issue and I was never asked to come up with one. My son was born in the US and also doesn't have a middle name.
My cousin was given his mother's maiden name as a middle name when he joined the navy
What else would your mom call you when she's pissed off?
I don't know that it's absolutely mandatory but it's definitely pervasive.
I've usually seen NMN used for no middle name.
Poor Alex Song (A.S.S.)
There's also Ulysses S. Grant. The "S" was apparently just a mistake on his enrollment at West Point. His birth name was Hiram Ulysses Grant. He tried to switch his first and middle names, but ended up with the initials USG instead of UHG.
And then there's the odd case of "Thomas a Becket." Thomas Beket was never called Thomas a Becket in his lifetime. He apparently went by many names, one of which was "Beket," but never "a Becket."
https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2023/research/thomas-a-becket-study/
Yeah, that's just odd. 'A' isn't something you'd find before a surname as part of the name, unlike 'd' or 'o' etc.
In Wales they used to use ab/ap as a patronym, a bit like Mac in Gallic. There might have been similar in parts of whatever they called England before the anglo-saxons came, but that's not likely to have influenced anything by the time of Becket, or the later time when the 'a' was added.
I don't think it has really survived in Wales either; the 'a' has often dissapeared and the p/b merged with the fathers name, like Prichard, or Bowen.
Homer Jay Simpson Or Homer J. Simpson
If his name is S why is there a period... like an abbreviation.
People are used to adding periods so they just add it in.
Source: My middle name is a letter.
J Moore, the Moore in the wildly used Boyer-Moore string search algorithm, has a first name of a single letter, J. It's not an abbreviation.
Moore enjoys rock climbing.[6]
This might be the most concise paragraph I've ever seen on Wikipedia!
That also reminds me of this one public speaker back in 30 A.D. Jesus H Christ. Apparently the H is just an H. Who woulda thought.
I thought H stood for Harold. As in, "our father, who art in heaven, Harold be thy name..."
Lano and Woodley fan by any chance?
Never heard of them, sorry. I got that from an old Straight Dope article.
Monkey D. Luffy type shit