zealious & mischievious

[Joel S. Berson]

At 11/8/2010 11:08 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Jonathan Lighter
><wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Google finds a number of individuals sporting the given name "Zealious."
> >
> > Just now an "entertainment attorney" on CNN by phone from Stamford, Conn.,
> > spoke of "a zealious prosecutor" and a "zealious prosecution."
> >
> > I expect the spelling will be cleaned up in the transcript. Maybe.
> >
> > / 'zElj at s /
> >
>
>Has anyone named "Mischevious" turned up?

There must be Puritan children named "Zealous" and "Mischievous" --
and they weren't very good spellers either.

... And ancestry.com alleges 172,144,949 hits for "Mischievious" as a
first name. (Of course, this count includes many alternate spellings,
including the simple initial M.)   Here probably only one genuine
(since the second listing by relevance is Sister M Regis) --
Mischievious Dowling, from something called "U.S. School Yearbooks
Index", with no dates or city, only "Connecticut".  I wonder what her
classmates signing her yearbook wrote about her.  (No Mischevious as
a last name.)

For "Mischievous", there are 11, all from the U.S. School Yearbooks
Index.  But now I'm beginning to think these are not birth names, but
instead what their classmates did write in their yearbooks.  One
alleged person is Mighty Mischievous Mix, of California.  If anyone
wants to get a free, 14-day subscription, they might be able to look
at the source document(s).

There are 1,783,816 hits for "Zealious" as a first name.  Including
some genuine: in the first 20 for example Zealious Cannday, born
about 1878; Zealious Arterberry, born about 1895.  I suspect that
there is some authority for naming a child Zealious, but I have no idea where.

Joel

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