[Ads-l] New feminine name

[George Thompson]

Sent this a day or two ago to JL, but since the topic has caught on here --
more or less -- I'll share it with the multitudes:
The original compiler of the bibliography of reference books for stumped
reference librarians was Isidor Mudge.  I've read that she got her first
name because her parents wanted to butter up a rich relative named Isidor,
who in the end left his wad to someone else.

GAT

On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 9:50 AM, W Brewer <brewerwa at gmail.com> wrote:

> ML:  << President Obama's mother's name was Stanley Ann Dunham. >>
> WB:  <Norfleet> was the given name of my last landlady when I was a student
> at UCLA. Her familiar contemporaries called her <Norfleet>, which told me
> that she must have come from a prominent Protestant family. I suspect
> feminine <Stanley, Jordan, Joyce> usw. were originally surnames that
> emerged as alternative idionyms as the rigid hagionymic nomenclatura fell
> out of fashion in Protestant regions.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
George A. Thompson
The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998.

But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
your lowly tomb. . . .
L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", Poems.  Boston, 1827, p. 112

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