Quote Originally Posted by Ze View Post
In the second book of "Series of Unfortunate Events," there's a character named "Montgomery Montgomery." His fellow scientists used to mock him as such: "Hello hello, Montgomery Montgomery."
I've heard of a few people in real life whose first names are the same as their surnames (there used to be a fairly well-known doctor down here called David David, who was a prominent figure in the field of craniofacial surgery, for example), and you really have to wonder what their parents were thinking when they decided to give them identical first and last names. Talking of unthinking parents, I used to know a rather unfortunate young man whose surname was Armstrong. Guess what his parents called him?

My mother absolutely loathes the name she was given, Marilyn, because Marilyn Monroe was big when she was growing up and everyone used to call her that, which she hated. Once while being cheeky, I called her it myself - I only ever did it once. (She was similarly unimpressed by my claim, made many years later (when I'd become too big for her to clout!), that if she was growing up nowadays, she'd be more likely to be associated with that nice Marilyn Manson fellow!)

Funnily enough, when I was a teenager, I wrote this awful, awful, awful science-fiction/horror story whose many faults included the fact that one of its female characters had the name Alice Cooper! (I didn't know that was the name of a shock rocker who'd probably been around for a good while even back then; I just thought it sounded like a nice name.) On that subject, I think I'm going to have to change the name of a character in a (hopefully much better) story I'm writing now. The character in question is called Simon Rutherford, which I've since learned is also the name of a British DJ (since said character is a complete psychopath, I don't think his real-life namesake would be terribly impressed to share his name!).

Finally, on another humorous note, I've been a longtime fan of a Swedish death metal band called Dismember, who, for a few years, had a guy by the name of Richard Cabeza in their ranks. Nothing too odd about that, I hear you say, until you learn that Cabeza is the Spanish word for "head"! I was lucky enough to do an interview with someone else from that band (for a magazine I write for) a few years back, so was able to ask if that was the aforementioned musician's real name. "Yes, yes," came the reply. "His mother [I think it was] is Spanish." I didn't have the heart to tell him that that wasn't what I found so odd about his name!