Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Unique Names, Please

I have nothing at all against Andrew or Rachel as people, but I am somewhat glad that my two as-yet-unmarried children are no longer dating people with those names. Just too confusing.

At one point, shortly after Laura joined the family, David was dating someone named Lori. I told Rachel she absolutely could NOT date anyone named Larry. Just too confusing.

I do know a man who married someone with the same first name as his mother. That led to two closely related women with the same first and last name. Just too confusing.

That reminds me of a favorite linguistics story in our family. (If you don't understand linguistics, you might not think this is funny.) We were living in Papua New Guinea and we went to market one Saturday morning. There were dozens of different kinds of bananas for sale (have you noticed we only get one or maybe two varieties here in the States?). So we asked someone, "Well, how do you tell all the different kinds of bananas apart?" To which they responded, "It's easy--they all have different names."

4 comments:

Freethinker said...

Here's one for you,

My uncle married a woman named Pam, later the got divorced but she kept his last name for some reason. Later my uncle married another woman named Pam (even the same middle initial). I don't remember exactly what happened, but there were some paperwork issues.

And I think I should marry a girl with the first name of Tracy.

Thainamu said...

Tracy Tracy. No, no, just too confusing. She'd have to go by Mrs. Melchizedek, Mel for short.

Anonymous said...

I actually had a volleyball class in college with a girl named Tracy Tracey. She married a man with that last name. So, it happens. :-)

Anonymous said...

I had two freinds in college that married each other and thier names were Aaron and Erin, which of course means they have the same last name now too-how confusing!
Rachel