Jill asks for your help in finding this old skool romance:
This is driving me nuts!! I cannot remember the title or characters names,
here is the plot…kind of. A girl maybe 17-18 years old is living in a
brothel( I can’t remember why she there). She is something of a maid.
She’s told that if she doesn’t start “working” like the other girls,
she’s gotta go. An older man comes in looking for a “girl” for his
grandson that is returning from sea (I think), he see’s this maid and picks
her, she thinks she’s going to be a governess for a child, unbeknown to her
that she’s been “bought” for a night.She is taken to a mansion and shown
to “her” room. Sometime in the night the grown grandson shows up, finds a
girl in his room, rapes her and falls asleep. He wakes up the next morning
and realizes she was a virgin. I don’t remember if he keeps her there with
him or she goes back to the brothel, but I do remember her brother at some
point shows up, as it turns out he is old friends with the rapist, raises
hell and the poor girl and asshole marry. I think she becomes pregnant and I
remember Lord Byron had a cameo it this book. I think the guy in this book
is titled , maybe an heir to a duke?Please help!! I read this book 15 years ago and would love to read it again.
I have searched the net and used book stores for 5 years now, with no luck
:(.
I am going to go out on a limb and guess that the cover might possible feature hot pink. Or teal. Or both! Anyone recognize this one?
@Kinsey
I agree, otherwise why in the world would I be plowing through that gripping treatise “Lobster Fisheries of Maine: 1840-1900” and actually enjoying it. I’ve picked up two plot points already, and that makes it worth the time invested in an otherwise snooze-worthy book.
call59 – I’d have to call at least 59 people in Maine to learn what I learned from one little out of print, outdated book.
@Kinsey
I agree, otherwise why in the world would I be plowing through that gripping treatise “Lobster Fisheries of Maine: 1840-1900” and actually enjoying it. I’ve picked up two plot points already, and that makes it worth the time invested in an otherwise snooze-worthy book.
call59 – I’d have to call at least 59 people in Maine to learn what I learned from one little out of print, outdated book.
@Kinsey
I agree, otherwise why in the world would I be plowing through that gripping treatise “Lobster Fisheries of Maine: 1840-1900” and actually enjoying it. I’ve picked up two plot points already, and that makes it worth the time invested in an otherwise snooze-worthy book.
call59 – I’d have to call at least 59 people in Maine to learn what I learned from one little out of print, outdated book.
@Ahlison – Darn, my library system doesn’t have that one.
Oh well, maybe someone will take the idea anyway and write a new version. Maybe one of those screwball romance novels that’s so popular now adays. He can be thrown together with a woman who’s name was used for a popular vampire novel and she can’t convince the little annoying obsessed fans that she doesn’t drink blood. So he’s busy ducking real life spies and she has to stop kids from giving themselves nasty papercuts….
Re: “weird” names. I teach, and I admit that a bunch of us used to get together when we got our class lists and laugh about the ones that were obviously “creative.”
Then it was pointed out by one of my colleagues that most of the children whose names we were making fun of were African-American. And that in many families, unique names are valued because the families didn’t have the option to name their own children for generations. Naming became a source of pride and resistance—no more conforming to the rules set by a dominant culture that had literally robbed people of their identities.
After that wake-up call, I got a lot more careful about commenting on “funny” name stories. As well as skeptical, since a lot of these “my cousin knew someone who had such-and-such a name” stories are urban legends which seem intended to poke fun at people of a particular class or culture or linguistic group.
(Although I do admit to still occasionally mocking the gazillion spellings of Kaylie I’ve seen. )
Kilian: I’m an idiot. It’s been staring me in the face – the Duchess of Wellington’s given name was Catherine. She was called Kitty, but given how much I’ve read about Wellington, I’ve read her name many, many times and just ignored it. As my Diva likes to say (or did, until I started grounding her), “Duh, Mommy.”
Now to find out if any women were ever called Cat, because I don’t want the heroine to be called Kitty. (For one thing, she’s going to be a ward of Wellington for a short period.)
@Kinsey
It’s not much of a stretch from Kitty to Cat. I think you can pull it off. I don’t think the authenticity police will be able to call you out on this one.
try96 – sometimes we have to look at something 96 times before we see what is right under our noses
@Kinsey
It’s not much of a stretch from Kitty to Cat. I think you can pull it off. I don’t think the authenticity police will be able to call you out on this one.
try96 – sometimes we have to look at something 96 times before we see what is right under our noses
@Kinsey
It’s not much of a stretch from Kitty to Cat. I think you can pull it off. I don’t think the authenticity police will be able to call you out on this one.
try96 – sometimes we have to look at something 96 times before we see what is right under our noses
@Kinsey
It’s not much of a stretch from Kitty to Cat. I think you can pull it off. I don’t think the authenticity police will be able to call you out on this one.
try96 – sometimes we have to look at something 96 times before we see what is right under our noses
@Kinsey
It’s not much of a stretch from Kitty to Cat. I think you can pull it off. I don’t think the authenticity police will be able to call you out on this one.
@Kinsey
It’s not much of a stretch from Kitty to Cat. I think you can pull it off. I don’t think the authenticity police will be able to call you out on this one.
@Kinsey
It’s not much of a stretch from Kitty to Cat. I think you can pull it off. I don’t think the authenticity police will be able to call you out on this one.
@Kinsey
It’s not much of a stretch from Kitty to Cat. I think you can pull it off. I don’t think the authenticity police will be able to call you out on this one.
My poor Aunt Tina. Her sister’s name is Dorcas, so I always thought that she got the more normal name of the two – but I found our recently that she actually got the short end of the naming stick. Their last name before marriage was Cave, and the non-shortened version of her name? Battina. Battina Cave. AUGH!
(Pronounced Ba-TI-na, but still!!)
Kinsey, I can’t give you a proper citation, but I feel very confident that ‘Cat’ might well have been used between family or close friends in the early 19thC. ‘Catherine’ was a very common name, of course, and although Kate, Cathy and Kitty were probably the most common abbreviations, I feel sure that Cat existed too.
I think that is an interesting, and very important, observation. I didn’t know that these weird names were more common amongst black Americans—I just assumed they were generaI American weirdness! 😉
I can understand both the urge to come up with unusual names (in our overcrowded societies, coming across someone else with one’s own name is not unusual, and it is always disconcerting), and I can also see why it might be important for black parents to find names that had not been associated for centuries with a different class or ethnic group.
What I don’t understand is the lamentable failure in so many cases to check on the meaning of a name (or a common noun used as a name, like ‘Malice’) or to notice very obvious puns or double entrendres. Precisely because names are important, one would think that anyone bestowing a name on an infant would want ensure that the child would not be embarrassed or inconvenienced by it.
I imagine that most Americans who favour Celtic names are white, though, and they are not always blameless! In the case of Welsh names, fairly gross misspellings are rather common, and these really grate on a Welsh-speaker. The same may be true of Irish names, but I don’t know, because I don’t speak Irish. Again, I think that if one wants to use a traditional Welsh name, the least one can do is to spell it correctly. There are some established alternative spellings, because the English hijacked some of our masculine names and surnames long ago, which is why ‘Meredith’ is an acceptable spelling these days for Maredudd or ‘Evan’ for Ifan, but (with my sincere apologies to anyone here whose name it is), to spell Bronwen ‘Bronwyn’ is a solecism, because it changes the gender.
On one hand, you have urban legends that cast Black Americans or Southerners in the starring roles of naming stories that raise the eyebrows but aren’t actually true.
Then, you have the fact that in real life, in May 2010, drivers do not yield to Lord Jesus Christ in a crosswalk.
(For the record: “Lord Jesus Christ in a Crosswalk” is my new favorite curse when I stub my toe in the middle of the night.)
But with the stories of “I knew a person who knew some kid whose name was Toe Jam,” consider the descriptions piled onto the person who did the naming – some, if not most, are racial urban legends.
As for “Kylie,” in my experience with younger children, it’s Caden/Jaden/Kaden and any rhyming variation of “Aiden” as the most popular name. I do know one child named “Rex” and I freaking love his name. So awesome.
Didn’t Queen Elizabeth I have a governess she called Cat (or Kat?) If it was in use as a diminutive of Katherine in the 16th century, it shouldn’t be a problem to use it in the early 19th.
“Malice” as a name is not an urban legend. It was actually a famous tragedy of sorts in my area. When I first read the name in the local paper, I tried hard to pronounce it as something other than ‘malice” – muh leese? may lee chee? – but then I heard his grandmother lamenting his death on a tv news program and she pronounced it malice-like-the-noun, “Oh Malice. My Malice.” From Wikipedia:
Malice Green was a resident of Detroit, Michigan who died while in police custody after being arrested by Detroit police officers Walter Budzyn and Larry Nevers on November 5, 1992 during a traffic stop. Both officers were later convicted for Green’s death. The official cause of death was ruled due to blunt force trauma to his head, although several other prominent neuro-pathologists ruled that Green died from an acute cocaine overdose. Green allegedly failed to relinquish a vial of crack cocaine, attempted to assault the officers, attempted to grab Nevers’ gun and resisted arrest.
What a horribly sad story, Gwynnyd.
@AgTigress, I agree about the common nouns, but in the particular case of Malice as a given name there might be mitigating circumstances. I suspect someone might name a child “Malice” thinking of it simply as a variant on the spelling of “Malik” (Arabic for “King”) which is (in all its variants) a relatively common name in the US, especially among the African American community. I have seen the name spelled “Mailik” and “Malique” and I can imagine someone who didn’t know the word “Malice” might vaguely think that it “looked right” as a spelling for Malik.
But… that would only make sense if they pronounced it with a hard ‘k’ sound at the end, and his family didn’t. And the news commentators never did either.
I am all in favor of uncommon names. My firstborn was named after a Leonardo DaVinci paining – and no, not Mona Lisa – Ginevra. Ginevra diBenci’s portrait is in the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
Absolutely agree! What are some parents thinking? We worried that the initials of one of our kids would be RAG and could that be made into something hurtful to call our kid?
Possibly, but it is not hard to check in a dictionary to see whether the word has an everyday meaning as a common noun. These days, it is easier than ever to access dictionaries and glossaries of names with their meanings, like the useful and very detailed ‘Behind the name’ website. There seems to be an inherent contradiction here: if you just want to name your child with an ‘ordinary’ name that everyone knows, you don’t need to do any looking up. You just say, ‘let’s call him David’.
But if you want to go to the trouble of finding, or inventing, an unusual name, then I should have thought that the appearance, pronunciation and meaning would interest you enough to do some research. You wouldn’t just say, ‘what about Diarrhea —that’s an impressive-looking name!’ You’d look it up, surely, if you didn’t already know what it meant (It looks even better in BE—diarrhoea. 🙂 . But evidently not…
I expect most of you already know this entertaining site:
http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/
🙂
I’ve heard of this one as well! My Science teacher back in secondary school had a friend who’d named her son Guy after a romance novel, pronounced ‘Goo-ey’ – she told us about it since we had a Guy in our class. I wonder what the odds are?
I used to work for the same company as a gentleman named Robert MacRoberts. Seriously.
All of this makes me thankful that less-than-unusual names are the trend in my family, though when I was a teenager I did wish I didn’t share first AND middle names with three other girls in my class…
On unusual names:
I’ve always liked Julie Smith’s character The Baroness Pontalba or Talba for short who renamed herself. (Her illiterate mother named her Urethra on the advice of the racist delivery room doctor, and who thought it ‘sounded pretty’.)
What a great backstory for a character—from a reader’s standpoint anyway! I will certainly never forget her name and I was already prejudiced to love her and her attitude.
I would think someone who named their kid Malice would be into hard core punk rock music.
My sister works at Centrelink (Australian Social Security) and she is always hearing wierd names. One lady rang up to change her children’s names to Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca and Princess Leia.
The worst one was a kid called Anathema.
My name is pretty unique, but only because it was spelt wrong on my birth certificate, which apparently was reasonably common here in the sixties, with non-Anglo names.
Nemesis – she signed in before me at Security and I commented to the guard. [that I was glad I am not named Nemesis] The guard mentioned that Nemesis was going to the same place as I was, so she would still be there when I got there. She didn’t look like the type to start wars or carry grudges.
Novelette – cashier at a grocery store. I started to say “I bet people make jokes about your name all the time” and stopped. I realized, people might not make jokes about her name all the time.
It is a pretty word, and Novelty/unusual/one-of-a-kind or special would be a reasonable meaning for the word. If you didn’t ever read. Ever.
My full first name is Alexandria, I was only registered at school by my nickname until high-school. Alexandria was almost someone else. Some teachers tried to call me Alex. I could not answer to it, it was just to far away from my understanding of myself. Recently, I have used Alexandria and let people use Alex when they want to. So it may actually be my name now. At what point does a name become yours? How many times do you answer to it before you own it?
(My nickname is Lesia, and no, you didn’t say it right. A lot of the “black” names sound like my name (which is Ukrainian) so I like many of them. But I would still avoid Nemesis and Novelette.
All names have been changed to protect the guilty in the True Story below.
As seen by me in the hospital records I code. Baby Girl Jones became Pineapple Pancake Jones. The chart documented that the social worker went up to talk to the mother after the birth certificate was filled out. Conversation was gently held about why this might, maybe, not be the best choice of a name for Baby Girl.
“That’s all right,” the mother said, “she’ll be fine. Her older sister Pretty Girl does all right, and so will Pineapple Pancake.”
True story. And not disclosure of confidential health information because names are matters of public record.
Nothing too weird here, mostly because I can’t remember the crazy names I input into the database at work (although we are in the South, so I see a lot of Robert Lee So-and-so).
But, my own very common name is spelled uncommonly—Meagan. My mom claims it’s because I was born during the Reagan administration. And my husband is Jesse, with a brother named James . . . of course, they come from a long line of J names, so I suppose it’s not that weird, and my in-laws are fairly goofy (in a good way). But still, Jesse James . . . ?
Or their friends tried to get them interested in J-rock, gave them lots of records, but no information about musicians whatsoever. So parents always thought that Malice Mizer is a singer’s name, not band’s.
There was a man who worked at the ministry of agriculture in a southern African country about fifteen years ago. His name was No Harvest.
The tradition in that paricular culture was to name your children after a major event that took place when they were born. When the country was colonised in the late 19th century the tradition was simply translated into English.
My mother’s driver’s name was Lovemore. I knew a man called Teapot.
I once had business contact with a man named Dick Eudaly. He was a banker. Of course he was.
I went to school with a girl whose last name was “Ho,” a pretty standard Asian last name. Her first name was normal, but she said that her parents had chosen new, more “American” names when they came to the US, before they’d really gotten a good grasp of the language… so her dad was “Happy Ho” and (I’m almost sure) her mom was “Patience Ho.”
I’ve also known women named both “Precious” and “Princess.”
If recent then this is possibly inspired by the character Anathema Device from Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Not a name I would chose, but I could easily see fans using it.
It’s a bit late in the game, but I want to add to the list of weird names. I teach high school English as well as Yearbook, so the former makes me an annoying spelling and grammar Nazi and the latter gives me access to all the strange names parents saddle their poor children with. A couple of examples:
– Abcde (pronounced AB-si-dee)
– Mel Gibson (I kid you not—the school photographer came up to me and told me to scold the kid for writing it until I informed him that it was his real name)
– OneLove (because HIS parents loved Marley, I guess)
– JChryst
I’ve also seen Hershey, Oreo, Nestle, and various creative spellings of otherwise traditional names.
On another note—had a student write this word on a test before, care to hazard a guess as to what it is?
ANAUGHTYMOOSE
A clue is to say it out loud to yourself a couple of times.