Name game’s not reached here
I’VE been looking at names again. Yes, I know, it has become a bit of an obsession of late but they can be fascinating, particularly as we don’t usually get to choose them.
How many people have place-names, for instance?
George Washington’s ancestors actually came from Washington in County Durham (current population 61,000) before moving to America in the 17th century.
Abraham Lincoln, in comparison, has no connection with the English city that I could find.
Tony Blackburn, Felicity Kendal and Burt Lancaster all kept the names with which they were born and did not consider it necessary to change them for showbusiness reasons.
Those who did include Michael Joseph Pennington, better known as Johnny Vegas, and John Eric Bartholomew who chose to be known as Eric
Morecambe after the town of his birth.
Jayne Palmer dropped her perfectly reasonable maiden name and replaced it with Mansfield, a market town in Nottinghamshire, which was her married name at the time she became famous.
First names are a different species. There was speculation that Brooklyn Beckham was named after his place of conception but mum Victoria has said it was actually chosen by David simply because he liked it.
Other celebrities include Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom, Dakota Johnson, Cuba Gooding Jnr and Winona Ryder (Winona is a city in Minnesota).
There are plenty of first names with far away and exotic connotations:
Chelsea, Adelaide, Georgia and Verona, for instance. British ones include Bristol, London, York, Camden, Abergele, Keighley and Preston. With a slight shock, I discovered Barnsley is popular for a boy in Australia.
But what about West Yorkshire names? Is there anyone called Slaithwaite, Skelmanthorpe or Huddersfield? Probably not.