Why Do People Insist on Going With Three Names?
Frankly I do not know. I mean no offense here as some long names are almost musical sounding, but I find the use of three names to be rather pretentious. Again, not always, but for most people a first name and last name works just fine.
Please don’t mistake what I mean as I would hate to sound like the crazy guy that lives down the street. When I very much enjoy pleasant-sounding names such as Mary-Beth for these constructs are, euphonically speaking, really one name just with many syllables.
The writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Hans Christian Anderson, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were obviously adherents of the three-name nomenclature. Haley Joel Osment, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel Day Lewis, and James Earl Jones are all actors who seemed to need three names to get by. I do understand though that the Screen Actors Guild does not want to have duplicate names in its ranks and therefore, on occasion, requires an actor to expand his/her name but still…
Politicians such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Hilary Rodham Clinton, and John Quincy Adams seemed to have thought if two names were good then three must be better.
Two of the men who assassinated American presidents opted for three names: Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth although to be fair to Oswald the name Harvey only seemed to be widely used after he shot Kennedy so as to distinguish him from any other Lee Oswald who happened to be alive at the time.
The inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell was a three-name man as is the movie director Francis Ford Coppola. And let’s not forget Miley Cyrus’ father Billy Ray Cyrus who I often confuse with Billy Bob Thornton for some reason.
The American civil rights great Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by James Earl Ray while Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Conner are prominent members of the three-name club.
I am sure you can think of plenty of examples such as guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, rocker David Lee Roth, actor Lou Diamond Phillips, style icon Yves Saint Laurent, the creator of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries Arthur Conan Doyle, and hundreds of others.
Now I would never quibble with a name as cool as Martin Luther King Jr., but as you go over all these names do you think anyone would mistake them for someone else if they only went by their first and last name? I once had a colleague who started his name off with Alexander Maximillian and yes, he insisted that you not shorten this to Max…
Think how easy it is to recognize the person who goes simply by Bono, Bowie, or Lady Gaga. Slash, the guitarist for Guns and Roses, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and the 1960’s fashion star Twiggy all made it nice and simple for us.
We should thank them for not complicating matters.
Fortunately, there is a lot of historical precedent to use fewer names as opposed to more. Just look at names from a long time ago: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Voltaire. If it was good enough for them it is good enough for us.
Remember that famous question “What’s in a name?” Well, I guess it all depends on how many of them there are!
The bottom line is that when it comes to both profanity and names, moderation is most often the best way to go.
Average Always,
One note about the premise: my thoughts wander into the realm of whether all of these insist on their trinomial moniker, or whether some had it forced on them, perhaps historically. John Quincy Adams is the son of John Adams, both well known American statesmen. Did he use the affectation, or did history bestow it as an easy way to distinguish father and son?
And then there are always those who have more than three names. Perhaps your next piece will explore the naming of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. 🙂
Good point. Another one with quite a name is found in this blurb from Wikipedia:
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, known in the United States simply as Lafayette, was a French aristocrat and military officer who fought in the American Revolutionary War, commanding American troops in several battles, including the Siege of Yorktown. After returning to France, he was a key figure in the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830.
My guess is for David Clayton Thomas it was a more common first and last name that caused the additional name be included. Either way, he had a great voice.
That is one I would conceded sounds good together. Good point about the first and last name needing a little something in the middle to give it a little punch. Just as long as his bandmates, while working in the studio, did not insist on “David Clayton” whenever they were trying to get his attention!
My son goes by “Matt,” but I gave him a “pretentious” 3rd given name to honor his direct ancestor Giles Driver, the first Driver in my father’s lineage to arrive in Virginia with Col Joseph Bridger in 1655. Giles was granted his first 200 acres of land in Isle of Wight Countagey Virginia Mar 12, 1657 and by 1674 had grown his estate to 930 acres. The name had not been used in the 20th century until he was born in 1990. My late father had asked me to consider using it as a link to our heritage.
What a cool story and lineage! In these cases the 3rd name is fitting and really adds something to the narrative. Yours is a case with a name for a purpose instead of those celebrities who carry the extra name just to carry the extra name.