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Re: Name advice from a teacher
"...class registers of 40 years ago..." would yield a certain Daividh somewhere, hehe. Your folks must have been really avant-garde fellows. But seriously, did your name's spelling ever cause any scars to your psychic world?
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Not a bit. The Golden Years before YOU were born (perhaps that's why they were the Golden Years!) were the height of comformity and convention. No one would have openly used Nan's spellings Dorathy and Danel, and certainly my canny mother would not have openly saddled me with "Daividh" as a registered school name.I was carried on the school rolls as "David" all through school, called Dave or Davey at my insistence, and only in the late 60's, when times had changed and I knew people with weirder names like "Sunshine", did I own up to my name birthright. So no worries on the playground, mate!Incidentally, I once said that my name was the result of a misspelling by my ggrandmother. Not so, says my aunt in Edinburgh, who claims she has run across 3 or 4 unrelated chaps with the same spelling in her lifetime. It's nice to be legit...
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"No one would have openly used Nan's spellings Dorathy and Danel..."Well, I just chose those particular examples off the top of my head. However, if you'll check out the Office of the Chief Actuary's name lists at:http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/NOTES/note139/note139.htmlYou will see that both "Dorthy" and "Danial" made it to the Top 1,000 Names of the 1950s list. :)-- Nanaea
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Maybe in some places. Where I lived as a yard-ape in the late 50's was right outa Leave It To Beaver (downscale version). No divorces, no working moms, no laid-off dads , no second cars, no air conditioning. Stiflingly conventional, but we didn't realize it then. And then came the mid-60's...
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I'm tempted to ask when you first got color teevee.-- Nanaea
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B&W TV (1951) - first on the block! Color (1966).
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The first kin on the block to watch new episodes of "I Love Lucy" :)
By the way, when watching US 50s movies and TV shows, it seems to me that American english back then had a strikingly more constipated intonation and accent. Didi people actually talk like that back then?
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Yep, people really did talk like that back then. That's coz Americans were all white, anglo-saxon protestants back then, too. It wasn't so, then my teevee wouldn't tell me so. ;)-- Nanaea
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typo...I mean, *If* it wasn't so, then my teevee wouldn't tell me so.-- Nanaea
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Exactly, misspelled names never scared a kid. It drove me insane but I got over it. Plus if I had such a terriable experience why would I want to name my kids different names? The majority of people see a name thst is different they are impressed and like the new spelling or new name!
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