Sitting around the dinner table last Friday night, the crew (a portion of it anyway) was swapping stories about the craziest name we'd heard. Winner for the evening in my opinion was "Absidee." It won because it is spelled, "ABCDE," making it damn-near impossible to guess the pronounciation.
That was the end of that, until Tuesday, when I ran across the term "abecedarian" in a legal opinion:
Abecedarian
One who teaches language and the alphabet.
http://www.answers.com/abecedarian
What do you call a word that sounds like what it means? This is not onomatopoeia because the word doesn't imitate a sound.
4 comments:
First, wtf kind of legal opinion were you reading? Was it Scalia. I bet it was Scalia. He can lick my nutsack.
Second, I think the weirdest name(s) I've ever heard of were brothers in Oil City, PA whose names were pronounced Leh-mohn-jello and Or-ahn-jello. Obviously spelled "lemonjello" and "orangejello". Close runner up was a young woman whose name was pronounced "fee-mah-lay", spelled "female", because her mother didn't know English and thought the word sounded pretty the way she read it. Better than being named "Chlamydia" 'cause it sounds nice, I suppose.
{ k }
Sorry but Lemonjello and Orangejello are totally an urban legend :-)
I learned the word eleemosynary yesterday. It means "charitable" so it might come in handy when doing tax work.
True story:
Many years ago I happened upon an inner-city kid named:
(pronounce this) Feh-mah-lee
I asked Mom how she acquired this unusual name.
"That was the name on her wrist band"
I'll take your tales of odd names and trump all of 'em. I once knew a girl named Jasara. Jasara's parents had a good sense of humor - you see, Jasara (like so many government agencies) was an acronym: "Jump And Shout And Run About."
Genius!
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