Creating a Custom Name List

[Zazazu]

My real last name is Minger. Brits, feel free to point and laugh.

Not giving away much; I'm ridiculously easy to stalk.

[mildlydisguised]

My real last name is Minger. Brits, feel free to point and laugh.

* mildlydisguised points and laughs

Are you British too?  If so, you must have gone through hell at school.

Also this post has inspired me to edit my live.package too, thanks Khan, those are great names.  I have been trying to find websites with only unusual fore and surnames but nothing has leapt out at me yet.  I am getting tired of searching endlessly through census records full of tediously common names.

[Emma]

LOL poor Zaza

It depends how old Zaza is. 'Minger' has only really been about for the last 5 years or so, made famous by Jade Goody in the Big Brother house, when she had a verucca on her foot. Yes, I know. I'm sad.

[Lana B]

I met an English person with the name Merkin.
There are some interesting names listed here.

[mildlydisguised]

LOL poor Zaza

It depends how old Zaza is. 'Minger' has only really been about for the last 5 years or so, made famous by Jade Goody in the Big Brother house, when she had a verucca on her foot. Yes, I know. I'm sad.

This is true, I forgot how recently it entered the British consciousness.

And now I can't get rid of the image of Jade doing the drunken strip and showing us her 'kebab belly' among other things *shudders*

[Tigerlilley]

*Tigerlilley snorts because she is immature

Greatrakes 
Rosenkreutz
Lovecraft
Ravenscroft
Moorcock

Heh heh morecock

[Hegelian]

Trollope, Lovecraft, and some of the others (I'm not going to use Google!) . . . if you're going to use literary names, there are plenty of good ones. For some reason your list brought immediately to mind Strindberg and Swinburne; also Knut Hamsen, William Gass, Pynchon, Böll, and Grass; Cortázar, Calvino, and Eco; Beattie, Berryman, Borges, Bagehot, Bolingbroke, Bibesco, Bax, Bunyon. And so on.   

Hotchkiss had something to do with cannons. 

[Zazazu]

LOL poor Zaza

It depends how old Zaza is. 'Minger' has only really been about for the last 5 years or so, made famous by Jade Goody in the Big Brother house, when she had a verucca on her foot. Yes, I know. I'm sad.

This is true, I forgot how recently it entered the British consciousness.

And now I can't get rid of the image of Jade doing the drunken strip and showing us her 'kebab belly' among other things *shudders*

I'm American (German/British/Scottish/Irish/Cherokee), and the last name is German. But, my best friend's fiance spent several years in Britain. So that's how I first heard of it. Then I started seeing it online. And of course, I'm a Fat Boy Slim fan and it's in "It's a Wonderful Night" ("whether your girl looks like a minger or a supermodel"). And, while I've heard some others pronounce it ming - err, it's definitely pronouced ming- grr.

[Sagana]

I am getting tired of searching endlessly through census records full of tediously common names.

The US 1990 census has been arranged in order of name frequency so, although it's still full of tons of common names, all you hafta do to get to the rare ones is scroll down to the bottom. Those are the rarest ones:

http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/freqnames.html

It's divided into last names, male first, and female first names.

And now for something completely different.

The Land of Cockayne (or Cockaigne) is a mythological land of plenty - something like the land of milk and honey. There's a famous painting by Bruegel on this theme and a poem. I've read some good scholarly articles that believe there's an etymological (and behavioral) reference/connection to cocaine there. Something like the wicked witch's poppy fields in Oz, the witch's candy house in Hanzel and Gretel (nibble, nibble), Pinocchio's paradise or the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Wikipedia article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockaigne

[Khan of Wyrms]

There are some interesting names listed here.

Cholmondeley= 'chumly'   That one's a keeper!

. . . if you're going to use literary names, there are plenty of good ones.

Literary names are definitely fair game, like Moorcock, though often they are more ordinary than I care to use for sims.  If they are famous or renowned enough, and I like their work in general, they probably get a street named after them.

Hotchkiss had something to do with cannons. 

I snatched this one from the media over the past year, there was a former NHL player named Harley Hotchkiss who died recently.  The Hotchkiss you are thinking of was involved with machine guns, maybe?  There is of course the Hotchkiss military jeep:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Jeep_Man/hotchkis.htm

That name is one of my favorites, it just has it all.

http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/freqnames.html

Thanks for that link.  It could take lots of time to search through it, though, even starting from the bottom.

[mildlydisguised]

The US 1990 census has been arranged in order of name frequency so, although it's still full of tons of common names, all you hafta do to get to the rare ones is scroll down to the bottom. Those are the rarest ones:

http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/freqnames.html

It's divided into last names, male first, and female first names.

Thanks   That has helped my search no end.

[notveryawesome]

Khan, I've got one for you. There's a local DJ who goes by the name of Craven Morehead (could be Moorehead -- I've never seen it written). I doubt if it's his real name, but I thought it was funny/clever in a juvenile sort of way. It sounds like a name that Bart Simpson would use in one of his crank calls.

Edited to remove redundancy.

[Gwill]

* Gwill ponders changing her name to "Bork"

[J. M. Pescado]

I've always thought it would have been nice to be "Richard Head", but my last name wasn't cooperative. That name is so me, though.

[mildlydisguised]

I've always thought it would have been nice to be "Richard Head", but my last name wasn't cooperative. That name is so me, though.

So your first name is Richard, then

[witch]

There was a racehorse in NZ named Richard Cranium.

[J. M. Pescado]

So your first name is Richard, then

No, it isn't. It wasn't very funny with my name, so I didn't go for that option.

[jsalemi]

I've always thought it would have been nice to be "Richard Head"...

That reminds me of a RL family story -- my female cousin is a nurse, and she swears like a longshoreman.  After spending a week visiting, her 6 year old granddaughter went home, and one day was wondering why her mom kept calling my cousin's husband Don -- the grandkid kept insisting his name was Richard.  When asked why, she said "Because grandma always calls him Dick!"

[Hegelian]

Hotchkiss had something to do with cannons. 

I snatched this one from the media over the past year, there was a former NHL player named Harley Hotchkiss who died recently.  The Hotchkiss you are thinking of was involved with machine guns, maybe?  There is of course the Hotchkiss military jeep

It would appear the term "Hotchkiss gun" was used most often for a 47mm light "mountain" cannon manufactured by the French arms and automobile company Société Anonyme des Anciens Etablissements Hotchkiss et Cie, founded in 1867 by an engineer from Connecticut. Some of these were bought by the U.S. Army and used in the invasions of Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890s, and against the Sioux at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Another well-known Hotchkiss gun was a 37mm revolving cannon that could fire 43 shells per minute; this was used against the Ute people in 1879.

[Zazazu]

I've always thought it would have been nice to be "Richard Head", but my last name wasn't cooperative. That name is so me, though.

My highschool choir teacher was named Richard Peter Dick. We called him Triple Dick.

[jrd]

Part of my family has the last name Pecker.

[Sleepycat]

back when I was a kid, I had a teacher whos last name was Ball, her husbands first name was Harry 

[Gwill]

Hardon was a pretty common first name in Norway up to about a hundred years ago.

[akatonbo]

I've always thought it would have been nice to be "Richard Head", but my last name wasn't cooperative. That name is so me, though.

My highschool choir teacher was named Richard Peter Dick. We called him Triple Dick.

That is a terrible, terrible thing for a parent to do to a child. *laughs her ass off*

[Faizah]

On the subject of teachers, for woodwork I had Mr. Carpenter and my brother had Mr. Pine. The school only had two woodworks teachers.


However, earlier, I'd gone to school with a guy whose surname was Kerr. Not a bad name by itself, there are Kerrs in my family tree.

But his first name was Wayne.