TIL that the “S” in “Harry S. Truman” isn’t an abbreviation. His middle name was just “S”.
Harry S. Truman - Wikipedia
TIL that Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, had no middle name. His middle initial “S” was not short for anything, but was chosen to honor both of his grandfathers, Anderson...
Homer Jay Simpson Or Homer J. Simpson
If his name is S why is there a period... like an abbreviation.
People are used to adding periods so they just add it in.
Source: My middle name is a letter.
Came here for this!
Because sometimes they insist on abbreviating. It is just a stupid abbreviation.
I had a friend like this in college. His name was AJ. That's it. Just the letters.
Everyone in the department spent ages trying to guess what it stood for. I managed to glance his ID when we got lunch together once. His name was just AJ. There weren't even periods marking it as an abbreviation.
Still haven't told anyone though
Did you call him Aj or A.J?
Now I want to name a kid Ay-Jay.
S and a dot apparently.
S and a dot is just for when you want to abbreviate the S by adding an additional character.
That was the whole pun wasn't it?
Have an old friend/colleague with the last name Oh, share the same first name, so at work we would always say, John S., John D, John O type of deal, for some reaosn it would keep me wondering if we were really saying Oh or O. For him. (John isn't really the first name, just an example)
My grandpa's name was Larry. I had always assumed it was short for Lawrence. I just found out recently like 8 years after he died that it wasn't even short for that. Apparently my illiterate great grandparents wanted to name him Larrington (which I'm 90% sure isn't even a first name in the lexicon). Apparently my great grandmother wanted him to grow up to be Larrington the Lawyer. My guess is that was a name of a local law firm she had heard of something because it definitely sounds like a surname that you would hear on a law office advert, (i.e. call Larrington and Mitchell). Turns out they couldn't spell Larrington and just decided to name him Larry for short. So his fucking birth certificate has a nickname on it for a name he wasn't even born as. My mind was fucking blown hearing this.
My dad's name was the shortened version of a longer name and he said teachers in the prestigious British high school he went to (he went on scholarship, he wasn't rich himself) continually insisted that his name must be the longer version no matter what he tried.
He was also told, "children at this school go to Oxford or Cambridge" by his headmaster when he asked for a letter of recommendation when applying to Sheffield. He got into Sheffield anyway. Eventually got a PhD. Fuck that guy.
That also reminds me of this one public speaker back in 30 A.D. Jesus H Christ. Apparently the H is just an H. Who woulda thought.
J Moore, the Moore in the wildly used Boyer-Moore string search algorithm, has a first name of a single letter, J. It's not an abbreviation.
Moore enjoys rock climbing.[6]
This might be the most concise paragraph I've ever seen on Wikipedia!
I used to work with a guy that was from China. He only had a first in a last name. He was going to college here and the college required everyone to have a middle initial as part of their login. They just used his last initial as his middle initial.
Wait does everyone there have a middle name? I'm Dutch and I don't have a middle name. I figured that was quite common also in the English speaking world
My grandfather and father dont have a middle name.
Both Sicilian (Father born in the U.S though)
I don’t have either. Maybe it’s a murican thing
He's the only person I've known here in almost 50 years without a middle name. It's quite possible other people haven't had a middle name but it's never come up.
The famous poet Edgar Poe also didn't have a middle name
I have two. You can borrow one for a while.
Not that I'm aware of Gerry F. Flap.
I knew that middle names are common in the US but I didn't know it's so deep in the culture
One of those things that’s just normal so we don’t talk about it I guess.
I've usually seen NMN used for no middle name.
Poor Alex Song (A.S.S.)
Hairy Ass
Monkey D. Luffy type shit
I'd tell people my middle name was "S" too if I were a boy middlenamed Sue. How do you do?!
Better kill that son-of-a-bitch who named ya that.
Just don't underestimate them... I hear they "kick like a mule" and "bite like a crocodile"
Harry "Cool S" Truman
Back in the 90’s I worked for a guy whose first name is “H”.
Pronounced as Aitch or Haitch?
Haitch
I knew an H Jay.
/s
I was going for the Harrys Truman, but this is much better.
What a coincidence. I never knew this despite my penchant for useless trivia but just yesterday at an airport I overheard some high school kids asking each other trivial pursuit questions and this was one. The next day: this post. Uncanny.
I'm skeptical. This could be true, or AI generated nonsense. It does link to a source, but I can't verify the source.
This is the reference. It's a dotgov.
There's also Ulysses S. Grant. The "S" was apparently just a mistake on his enrollment at West Point. His birth name was Hiram Ulysses Grant. He tried to switch his first and middle names, but ended up with the initials USG instead of UHG.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ulysses-S-Grant
And then there's the odd case of "Thomas a Becket." Thomas Beket was never called Thomas a Becket in his lifetime. He apparently went by many names, one of which was "Beket," but never "a Becket."
https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2023/research/thomas-a-becket-study/
Is this the genesis of British "humour"? Thomas, a Becket, even got the name in the time of Shakespeare.
Waiting for somebody to eviscerate me over British history, cause all I know is Monty Python.
Yeah, that's just odd. 'A' isn't something you'd find before a surname as part of the name, unlike 'd' or 'o' etc.