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SpursRiot2012

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1 hour ago, Steve Justice said:

On the flip side, what about boys with girls names? 

I knew a guy named Kelly. And if that wasn't tough enough for him, his surname was Dike. 

Oddly, for a long time as a kid, I thought Kelly was a boy's name, because the first person I ever heard of or saw with that name was a man. Think it was on a TV programme. And it wasn't for some time that I saw enough Kellys (Kellies?) that were women to realise it's more a girl's name.

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My nephew, and one of my cousin's kids, both have my Mum's maiden name as their first name. It's a name that works as a first name too, so it's not like they're called Johnson or anything, but there is that sort of tradition in our family for keeping the Mother's name alive as part of the male line. God knows why, Mum's one of thirteen kids, so it's not like there's any shortage of their name out in the world. 

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Yeah, Kelly is popular in North America. My cousin moved to Canada years ago and her husband was called Kelly. 

Murphy is an odd one as I’ve always known it to be a mans name as my dads mates called that. But over the years I’ve met and heard of more girls named Murphy. 

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The one that always amused me is that there are a number of women in the US called "Veruca", because of Roald Dahl and the fact that they use the term "plantar wart" to describe what we call verrucas.

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10 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

Murphy Brown was a very popular show in the 90s. So I'm sure that helped the popularity as a girl's name.

Today I learned that Murphy Brown was a woman.

One of those American pop culture things that I've never bothered looking into despite hearing it a lot. Like what a jalopy is.

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6 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

Like what a jalopy is.

So it's a learning day. I always understood a "jalopy" to mean an old-fashioned car out of the 1920s, the boxy ones that looked like a motorised horse-carriage, but it turns out it's just an old American term for an old banger. Cue some Wiki:

Quote

 

The word jalopy was once common but is now somewhat archaic. Jalopy seems to have replaced flivver (1910), which in the early decades of the 20th century also simply meant "a failure".[8] Other early terms for a wreck of a car included heap, tin lizzy (1915) and crate (1927), which probably derived from the WWI pilots' slang for an old, slow and unreliable aeroplane. In the latter half of the 20th century more coarse terms became popular, such as "shitbox".

The origin of jalopy is unknown, but the earliest written use that has been found was in 1924.[9] It is possible that the longshoremen in New Orleans referred to the scrapped autos destined for scrapyards in Jalapa, Mexico, according to this destination, in which they of course also pronounced the letter J as in English.[9] Another possible origin is the French "chaloupe" which refers to a "motor-boat" and could reference the sound an old car would make.[10]

 

 

Love stuff like this. And we should go back to using "tin lizzy" as a term.

 

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21 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

The one that always amused me is that there are a number of women in the US called "Veruca", because of Roald Dahl and the fact that they use the term "plantar wart" to describe what we call verrucas.

Even without the wart association, who read that book / saw that movie and decided that they wanted to associate their child with that character?? That's mad.

 

Edit: I used to watch Murphy Brown as a kid but can't remember anything about it other than she was busy and stressed and there was a running gag about her always having a new PA.

Edited by Chest Rockwell
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Just now, Chest Rockwell said:

Even with the wart association, who read that book / saw that movie and decided that they wanted to associate their child with that character?? That's mad.

It is bizarre, but maybe they just thought "that's a nice-sounding name, my kid won't grow up to be like that". To be fair, Veruca Salt is the only one of the five kids that has a fake name - all the others are real: Charlie, Augustus, Violet, Mike, so they might be forgiven for thinking it was a real name, and not think there was any need to check out what it actually was.

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12 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

Edit: I used to watch Murphy Brown as a kid but can't remember anything about it other than she was busy and stressed and there was a running gag about her always having a new PA.

Isn't that why SPOILER!!!!! Kramer gets a spot on it as a PA when he moves to LA? 

@Carbomb cheers. I kind of knew it was a car but could never be arsed to look any of it up, despite it being very prevalent in a lot of hip hop lyrics.

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22 hours ago, PJ Power said:

The Greenlandic town of Nanortalik lies further south than Lerwick in the Shetland Isles.

Also, Middle Island, Ontario lies further south than Crescent City, California.

Lerwick is closer to Oslo than it is to London.

Plenty of men have/had "female" first names including, but not limited to Marion "John Wayne" Morrison, Shirley "Big Daddy" Crabtree, Tracy Smothers, and Kelly Jones from off of out of the Stereophonics. It's likely that they started out as men's names and got "co-opted" by women like the whole "red/pink Vs blue" sex related colour thing, and at some point society mostly decided that they were now girl's names instead of boy's names.

@air_raidFor your Nigella Klaxon I did a work placement when I trained for my IT NVQ in 98 and the caretaker there was called Paul. He had two children (he may have had more, I forget now) a son named Paul, and a daughter named Paulette.

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28 minutes ago, jazzygeofferz said:

Plenty of men have/had "female" first names including, but not limited to Marion "John Wayne" Morrison, Shirley "Big Daddy" Crabtree, Tracy Smothers, and Kelly Jones from off of out of the Stereophonics. It's likely that they started out as men's names and got "co-opted" by women like the whole "red/pink Vs blue" sex related colour thing, and at some point society mostly decided that they were now girl's names instead of boy's names.

This is what I've definitely heard about those two names, and also for Stacy as well (Stacy Keach being the first one that comes to mind).

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