• pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 months ago

    It could be a David Foster Wallace reference. “In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk.”

  • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    Mildred is on my top list of dog names, along with Myrtle, Milhouse, Milton, Mortimer, and Mable. We currently have Monty, Mary, and Maizie.

    Never for a human, though. It’s too old fashioned. Unless you’re thought slime, then it just fucking works for some reason…

      • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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        3 months ago

        Started as a coincidence, turned into a bit of a tradition. Before the M names we named them solely on characters from our favorite media (Ricky, Lucy, Ethel, fred, Jack for a character from The Talisman, Ellie Mae). We’ve fostered a lot, so there’s been a lot of names. But when we got Monty, for Monty Python, we then named the next one Mary, for Mary Tyler Moore. We decided to name her sister Maizie, and just run with it.

    • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I throw no shade on Mildred… As long as she’s one of those girls who like dress in 1950’s fashions and is way too into electroswing.

      Then it’s only fitting.

      • inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Oh sure, I bet your Great Grandma is a lovely person and I have nothing against her or her name.

        But, it is very much a GREAT GRANDMA sort of name that is super out of date. I would be exactly as critical as a parent naming their child Mildred.

        • blackbrook@mander.xyz
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          3 months ago

          This generational. I’ve seen a number of names I thought of as grandma names come back into fashion. People who are young enough not to have experienced grandmas with those names pick them. Gertrude is a grandma name to me, BTW, not a great-grandma name. I actually had a grandma named Gertrude. Welcome to old. (Edit: my brain glitched from Mildred to Gertrude there. Looking forward to Alzheimers.)

          • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 months ago

            I low-key hope Agnes doesn’t come back… that’s my middle name… can’t stand it. I know it was my great grandmothers name, but I never met the woman… and it just feels… harsh. (Probs because I only heard it when I was in trouble, or when people were making fun of me)

            Plus side, my mom got talked out of naming me “Elsbeth”, which is a very very defunct precursor to Elizabeth (which she didn’t like)… Since frozen with Elsa, that probably would have been ok, but it didn’t come out until I was in my checks release very late 20s, by which point the damage would have been done.

            But hey I can’t complain too much on the naming lottery… my sister has a fully 100% boys name. Her middle name is a French version of Patrick.

            • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              I wish my middle name Shay (its the name i go by)would come back or be a thing for men. I’ve only ever met 2 other people in my age range with it, and both were women, and the one person outside of my age range was an old old old woman. I dislike my first name to such a large extent that I choose to go by Shay.

              • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                3 months ago

                I feel your pain. I wish I had a better first name or middle name to go by but I’m stuck between a shit place and a shitter place. And none of the nicknames I tried to get assigned actually worked out for me so… I either get nicknames I hate as much as the name itself or nothing. Super fun!

                And if you want to change names, holy fuck, best of luck!

                At least you have something you can relate to? I have never met anyone, of any gender, named Shay. I know that doesn’t necessarily help… but… it’s definitely not something I’d (as a solid middle age sort of person) consider a gendered name. Not more so than Aaron/Erin or any other neutral name…

                • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
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                  3 months ago

                  When you meet new people just tell them whatever name you prefer even if it’s not your name. 2ish years ago, I started going by Shay by just telling people that. But there were people who have always known me by my other name, but I just told them I always hated that name, so call me Shay, and I gently corrected them every time they called me by my other name. The only people who still call me by me og name is my wife and my girlfriend(poly relationship not cheating), but they are working on it.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      As a trans woman, fuck yeah Mildred. Take that awful name and make it your own. Sure you could’ve been a Megan or a Maria or even a McKenzie, but anyone could pull those off. You chose Mildred to flex on us plebs

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          So many of us have a ridiculous name. I kept mine to my middle name, but so many don’t, so I can just fully embrace someone deciding she’s talking great grandma’s name and damn the consequences

          • inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            I actually sort of am the opposite! Growing up my deadname had an unusual spelling. It was literally immposible for someone to spell it correctly on their first attempt. So every form filled out on my behalf had to be corrected, everytime my name was called there would be a double checking moment who I am. It was just a huge giant pain in the ass and even as a kid I knew I would change it, even for non trans reasons. So my chosen name is much more basic, it’s actually one of the most popular names for my birth year.

            I can’t tell ya what a sigh of relief I give off when a cashier asks my name and just spells it correctly without giving it thought. that I can say who I am and people just… know that it’s the person on the forum. So y’all are 10,000,000% valid and I love your damn the consequences vibes! But for me? I’m so happy with my basic simple unremarkable name.

            • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              I get that, unfortunately my hard to spell name is my last name and I liked it too much to change it. I also didn’t realize that my common name has so many spellings, but by fuck do a lot of people insist on proving that. I also just like having a name that doesn’t instantly draw people’s attention, especially since my last name does.

              My middle name on the other hand is fucking ridiculous, but it’s easy to spell so there’s that.

      • pyre@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        cishet dude here so i dunno how much what I’m about to say matters but I’ve always liked the name Eleanor(e) because The Practice is my favorite procedural series and in that show Eleanor was a badass woman with strong convictions and morals.

        she also was in one of the coolest scenes in tv imo, having a very heated argument entirely in sign language. here’s an unfortunately terrible recording of it: https://youtu.be/CwV9dHHQj-8

        anyway i think Eleanore is a cool name, but more than that, once people associate it with you that’s what they will think about when they hear the name, the kind of person you are. not the other way around.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
        Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
          But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
          And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
        This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—
               Merely this and nothing more.

      • rektdeckard@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Lol, Edith and Mildred are literally my grandmothers’ names. Edith is a badass and just turned 99.

    • Iheartcheese@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Nobody’s saying that it’s a made-up name. Just that it’s really stupid. It’s the name of a housewife during the Great depression

      • sorter_plainview@lemmy.today
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        3 months ago

        Since I am not from the western hemisphere, I find it difficult to understand what is wrong with the name. Is it just that it sounds bad? Or any other reason?

        • InquisitiveApathy@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          This excerpt from the linked Wikipedia article for the name abstractly summarizes it nicely.

          It reached the rank of the sixth most popular name for girls in the United States in 1912 and maintained that popularity through 1920, but then its popularity dropped quickly afterward.[2]

          The name Mildred was very common about a hundred years ago, but never really at any other point since. If you see the name Mildred without seeing the person in question your first thoughts will be that they are extremely old. That’s really about it.

      • 5714@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        I don’t see what’s wrong with the name. What’s bad about housewifes¹ during the Great Depression? Those people have had their lives we could respect like we do Billies or Gretas today too.

        ¹Apart from gendered division of unpaid labour and care

          • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            Might be a few name entry fields that disagree but yes, in the US, entirely valid.

            Meanwhile in Iceland:

            You can be Aagot, Arney or Ásfríður; Baldey, Bebba or Brá. Dögg, Dimmblá, Etna and Eybjört are fine; likewise Frigg, Glódís, Hörn and Ingunn. Jórlaug works OK, as do Obba, Sigurfljóð, Úranía and – should you choose – Vagna.

            But you cannot, as a girl in Iceland, be called Harriet.

            “The whole situation,” said Tristan Cardew, with very British understatement, “is really rather silly.”

            • snooggums@midwest.social
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              3 months ago

              Banning blatant slurs or directly offensive names is understandable, but unless Harriet means something really offensive there then it is just silly to have that restriction.

              The article points out that it is mostly to conform with language structure, but that is still a bit heavy handed.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

        Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
        Patrick McKenzie
        2010-06-17

        John Graham-Cumming wrote an article today complaining about how a computer system he was working with described his last name as having invalid characters. It of course does not, because anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them. John was understandably vexed about this situation, and he has every right to be, because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.

        I have lived in Japan for several years, programming in a professional capacity, and I have broken many systems by the simple expedient of being introduced into them. (Most people call me Patrick McKenzie, but I’ll acknowledge as correct any of six different “full” names, any many systems I deal with will accept precisely none of them.) Similarly, I’ve worked with Big Freaking Enterprises which, by dint of doing business globally, have theoretically designed their systems to allow all names to work in them. I have never seen a computer system which handles names properly and doubt one exists, anywhere.

        So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.

        1. People have exactly one canonical full name.
        2. People have exactly one full name which they go by.
        3. People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
        4. People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
        5. People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
        6. People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
        7. People’s names do not change.
        8. People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
        9. People’s names are written in ASCII.
        10. People’s names are written in any single character set.
        11. People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
        12. People’s names are case sensitive.
        13. People’s names are case insensitive.
        14. People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those.
        15. People’s names do not contain numbers.
        16. People’s names are not written in ALL CAPS.
        17. People’s names are not written in all lower case letters.
        18. People’s names have an order to them. Picking any ordering scheme will automatically result in consistent ordering among all systems, as long as both use the same ordering scheme for the same name.
        19. People’s first names and last names are, by necessity, different.
        20. People have last names, family names, or anything else which is shared by folks recognized as their relatives.
        21. People’s names are globally unique.
        22. People’s names are almost globally unique.
        23. Alright alright but surely people’s names are diverse enough such that no million people share the same name.
        24. My system will never have to deal with names from China.
        25. Or Japan.
        26. Or Korea.
        27. Or Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Botswana, South Africa, Trinidad, Haiti, France, or the Klingon Empire, all of which have “weird” naming schemes in common use.
        28. That Klingon Empire thing was a joke, right?
        29. Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.
        30. There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly. (Yes, yes, you can do it if your algorithm returns the input. You get a gold star.)
        31. I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it.
        32. People’s names are assigned at birth.
        33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
        34. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
        35. Five years?
        36. You’re kidding me, right?
        37. Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.
        38. Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed.
        39. People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.
        40. People have names.

        This list is by no means exhaustive. If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several. Feel free to add other misconceptions in the comments, and refer people to this post the next time they suggest a genius idea like a database table with a first_name and last_name column.

        • DaPorkchop_@lemmy.ml
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          3 months ago

          What would be an example of #8? Are there names which gradually morph from one name into another over time? In what way could a name change such that the change doesn’t occur at a specific point in time?

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            That one isn’t saying that names change gradually. It’s saying that names can change at any time and for any reason, not just e.g. when a woman gets married or something.

  • b000rg@midwest.social
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    3 months ago

    Thought Slime goes by Mildred…

    But they’re kind of self-aware, so I think it’s supposed to make them more off-putting.

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I used to watch Thought Slime a lot, even donated to them a few times… then started watching videos from the people they’ve “called out” on stream, followed a rabbit-hole of people who were hurt and never apologized to and realized they’re just another youtube dramafarmer clicks-at-all-costs, no discrimination, storyline-crafting liar. Like everyone.

      Free yourselves humanity, stop watching streamers.

      edit: I know the parasocialism online runs really deep and just saying this is going to get some people losing their shit to defend their fav streamer, I literally don’t care, you have to be aware that every streamer has an army of knights to defend them, and I don’t like engaging that way and am not going to spend my time arguing. I’m not out to change your mind, just explain why I changed mine.

  • Aremel@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I gotta agree with the post. Millie would be a cute alternative Mildred. The name reminds me of mildew.

  • pastabatman@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    When I was in school the kids with the weird names were either picked on or they were super cool and popular. Their parents had no idea which one they were going to be when they chose the name.

    Your friend has the benefit of knowing who she is already. If she knows she’s going rock it, then go Mildred.

    • Etterra@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      You’re usually fine if you’ve got a biblically significant name. Many of those have staying power. Adam, Joshua, David, Samuel, Michael, Rebecca, John, Mary, Paul, etc. not all of them work though, and it varies by culture. “Jesus” is really coming in Spanish but almost unheard of in English (American POV).

      • Alatain@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        That is a bit of a selection bias. What you are effectively saying is “the biblical names that have survived to today have staying power”.

        But even that isn’t true here as almost all of the names you cite are significantly different now than their original forms. Looking at your list we have Yeshua, Shemuel, Mikael, Rivka, Yohanan, Miriam, and Paulus. Adam is mostly the same, as is David (with a bit of an accent difference), but the rest didn’t exactly emerge as they were.

  • f4hy@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I 100% support people to transition. I don’t think people should get to pick their own names without any veto.

  • dreugeworst@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    my only criticism is that it isn’t old-fashioned enough. if we’re reaching back to old names, why not go all the way and pick a name like Ælfgifu