new name you can use on your kid

[George Thompson]

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned names, like "Fretwell".

     [William Vandrills, will carry gentlemen, their wares or their
merchandise, from New-York to Philadelphia, in a boat that will "sail from
New-York for Thomas Akin's, in South Amboy, every Monday and Thursday, in
every Week, where a Waggon will be kept ready to proceed immediately for
Fretwell Wright's in Burlington; and upon their Arrival there they will
directly get a Passage to Philadelphia"; he keeps his boat at Whitehall
Slip, or leave messages and letters with Capt. Lewis, "at the sign of the
Devonshire"]
     N-Y Mercury, December 18, 1752, p. 3, col. ?

This seems to be a particularly hard-line Puritan name, like "Thankful",
only more so -- I actually knew a "Thankful", a young woman in Maine, in the
mid 1960s.

GAT

GAT

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> The computerized sales slip from the supermarket tells me that my cashier
> was "Jherrica."
>
> Over 10,000 raw Google hits for "Jherrica," over 150,000 for "Jherica."
>
> To generalize from my experience, they should be mostly twentyish white
> ladies with hair the color of blood.
>
> JL
>
> --
> "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
>



--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ.
Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

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