New English (?) name: Jhan

[Jonathan Lighter]

You're thinking of Jann [sic] Wenner.
Also, about ten years ago, I had a student named "Yon."  (No, not Yonson. I
forget his last name.)

Otherwise, he was a perfectly normal, middle-class white kid.

JL
On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 9:53 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: New English (?) name: Jhan
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 9:17 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The first masculine "Jan" Â I ever heard of in English was the once
> > famous/infamous Jan Bakker.
>
> Stabbing in the dark, I'd guess that that name is ethnically Dutch.
> Once upon a time, I was acquainted with a guy of Polish ancestry whose
> first name was Jan. He was a "boyfriend-in-law": my girlfriend's
> roommate's boyfriend. Hence, the relationship was so tenuous that I've
> forgotten his surname.
>
> This masculine "Jan" is also unique in my experience. A WAG is that
> perhaps Jhan was originally "Jan," and was motivated to modify the
> spelling in order to avoid being continually mistaken for a woman,
> _Jan_ as a first name for a man being rare in the U.S. BTW, isn't
> there a masculine Jan [Surname] associated with the magazine, Rolling
> Stone? He's also of apparent Dutch ancestry. And there was Jan who
> "loved music.   _He_ loved singing. _He_ could play the noisy drum." A
> brief history of his musical endeavors was contained in the the second
> song that I learned in the first grade, right after Jump, Jim Crow.
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org