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HelpRe: Sky... for a boy
in reply to a message by RoxStar
I do wonder where the movies got the ideas for the names of the cowboys. Some of them are pretty out there. I've got a list of the wackier ones I've seen around somewhere.
Like, Quirt? What is that? Sky seems reasonable compared to Quirt.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the names we think of as "cowboy names" like Red and Buck were actually nicknames so cowboys wouldn't have to go around being called Virgil and Orville or something
Like, Quirt? What is that? Sky seems reasonable compared to Quirt.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the names we think of as "cowboy names" like Red and Buck were actually nicknames so cowboys wouldn't have to go around being called Virgil and Orville or something
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a quirt is a short riding whip...
So I would be inclined to think it was a nickname.
Back then, though there were exceptions, there was not as muc importance placed on creativity as there is today. IN general, while there was theoretically a large pool of names to choose from, in actual practice, many more people were named in what we'd now call the top 100 than are named from that pool today. Loads more Johns, Williams, Georges, Marys, Annas and Sarahs.
(Also, men who worked the frontier were by nature transient, and often on the shady side, trying to escape their pasts or make fresh starts. They wouldn't necessarily keep the same name when they moved onto a different ranch) And often men were known by the names of towns they'd distinguished themselves in, so you'd have Cheyenne, Abilene, Reno, that kind of thing.
So I would be inclined to think it was a nickname.
Back then, though there were exceptions, there was not as muc importance placed on creativity as there is today. IN general, while there was theoretically a large pool of names to choose from, in actual practice, many more people were named in what we'd now call the top 100 than are named from that pool today. Loads more Johns, Williams, Georges, Marys, Annas and Sarahs.
(Also, men who worked the frontier were by nature transient, and often on the shady side, trying to escape their pasts or make fresh starts. They wouldn't necessarily keep the same name when they moved onto a different ranch) And often men were known by the names of towns they'd distinguished themselves in, so you'd have Cheyenne, Abilene, Reno, that kind of thing.
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Yes people tended to select many safe traditional names back then but I've read that among the pioneers and people settling the Wild West that people tended to be more adventurous when naming than people on the other side of the Mississippi river. We do have a wider selection of commonly used names right now but back then people out West were more adventurous about naming than other people in the US. Some theories I've read is that they think since people had an adventurous enough spirit and were taking the risk to be out there in the first place that they were more likely to choose a less conventional name for their children.
But you are also probably right that some of or most of the really odd names we hear about were probably nn's or aliases.
I'm just saying that Sky as a name is something I can imagine getting used because it's not too out there and because nature names, word names, place names, and surnames were some of the more common names used by people who were breaking convention at the time when they named their children.
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But you are also probably right that some of or most of the really odd names we hear about were probably nn's or aliases.
I'm just saying that Sky as a name is something I can imagine getting used because it's not too out there and because nature names, word names, place names, and surnames were some of the more common names used by people who were breaking convention at the time when they named their children.
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This message was edited 4/20/2013, 1:49 PM
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