Traditional Southern Names

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Eddie Haynes, and I’m calling from Glover, Vermont.

Glover, Vermont. Welcome to the show, Eddie. What’s going on?

Yes, thank you.

Well, I’m calling from Vermont, but my question is really more Texas-based, actually, which is where my family’s from.

So I was just curious about nicknames in the South and if there’s any other traditions that has such a colorful group of names.

And I have a list of my family here, which is pretty good.

Oh, yes. Let’s have the list.

The most traditional, which would be a granny and granddaddy Alan. But then we have Mama Sue, whose real name was Lulabelle, which she hated.

And she was married to Daddy B. And all the aunts, we say ain’t. Not aunt, we say ain’t.

We have Aunt Tommy, which is an ain’t skinny, ain’t baby. We have Aunt Skeeter, who was married to Uncle Son. And that’s Uncle S-O-N.

A sister named Zolly, who went by the name Tate. We have Mama Nix and Daddy Nix and Susie and Shorty.

Nana and Papa, whose names were Ada Ruth, and she was called Rusty because of her red hair, and Johnny Lee, and my mom was Sandra Sue because her hair was red.

And my grandmother, Rusty, wanted to be able to call her Sandy. And we have Dee and Bubba, and I have an uncle named Buzzy Boudreaux from Louisiana.

And I just thought they’re such amazing names and such an incredible thing, and I was wondering if there’s any other traditions that have such a colorful way of naming their family members.

Hey, my dad was named Henley Hewix Barnette. That was his name.

Yes. Henley Hewix Barnette.

Yes. Holy moly.

He was born in a log cabin at the foot of a mountain. And I asked him, where did you get that name? And he said, I don’t know.

They probably saw it in the newspaper or something. But I’ve never been able to find the source of that.

You know, and his sister was Aunt Maiso. Aunt Maiso. Wilma Maiso.

This has been studied, or at least it has been written about, in the Journal of American Speech and a few other linguistic and language journals.

And in American speech, there was a great language researcher by the name of Louise Pound. And she worked at a variety of universities around the country.

And really, the American Dialect Society considers her to be one of the core historical members. She wrote about this and she kept lists of names from her students in Nebraska and some other places as well.

And a lot of them sound like the names that you just reported. She particularly loved, as you pointed out, the two names.

And so a lot of times they give people two names, but they combine them into one. So Lucy Bell isn’t two names. It’s your first name, Lucy Bell.

And there’s no space in there. So you’d have Lucy Bell and Lynette and Bethine and Armina and Burdeen and really interesting names.

But one of the names that she recorded, which I think H.L. Minkin in turn reports in his book, The American Language, this is a whole name found on a tombstone near Montgomery, Alabama.

And it is Henry Ritter, Emma Ritter, Derma Ritter, Sweet Potato, Crema Tartar, Caroline Bostic.

Wow. That is an entire name.

Was that male or female? Well, Henry’s the first name, so I think it’s probably male.

But there’s some female things in there. There are indeed. Maybe it’s like the French tradition of putting Jean-Marie.

That’s right. All the language authorities would agree with you, Eddie, that there is a tradition in the South of longer names, more ornate names, names with character and flavor.

And yet we do find throughout the United States that a tendency to kind of leave the old traditional names aside has grown.

And there’s a site called Proofreader.com, and they actually intentionally misspelled Proofreader with two Fs.

Proofreader.com did a really nice analysis of the Social Security Administration data, and they showed that starting in about 2000, we reached this period of maximum naming diversity.

So we’re getting more names to fewer people. And it’s not just the Southern tradition or the African-American tradition.

There are some exceptional names in the Northeast of the United States, and some of them have a French resonance and some of them have a call back to favorite literature or just whatever happened that day.

Like the young woman named Vest, because when she was born, her father kept her warm in his vest.

Oh, my goodness. Really? Wow. That’s amazing.

Yeah. It’s wonderful that people have such interesting names.

I think it’s fantastic. It just makes me feel like also with my family, like I have such a good connection, even with the ones I’ve never met and whose names I don’t understand.

And it’s just sort of there’s a uniqueness to it that I think is really beautiful.

Well, Eddie, I’ve got to thank you for this really interesting call. Your family sounds like a great bunch of people.

I’d love to go and just hear those names being tossed around. And I also know that you’ve probably opened the floodgates to a lot more people reporting the interesting names in their families.

And we welcome them. Thank you so much for calling, Eddie.

Thank you very much. Take care now.

All right. Bye-bye.

You too. Bye.

If you’ve got some weird family names, like to have Olsi, Hasi, Koba, Bleiba, Onza, Ritha, Otella, and Latrina, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.