This actually came as a surprise to me. So far in my life (cue that Beatles song) I've met two people with my first name - one was the grandmother I'm named for - and I've heard of a couple of others, like Leta Armstrong, daughter of Heather "Dooce" Armstrong; and some nice lady in Simcoe-York in Ontario. Most Google returns for my name have to do with me, except, thank goodness, the ones that refer to cemetaries.
The "How Many of Me" site says that there are 11,999 people in the U.S. with my first name and that 99.9% of us Letas are female. So if one of y'all could name a child "Leta" it would push the Leta-colony up to 12,000 after which it would only be a matter of time before we hit that Top Ten Names thing that my sister, Sara, was always on and I was never on and maybe, just maybe, one could then find kid's bicycle licence plates and jewelry that said Leta which I never could when I was a kid and when it *mattered* to me NOT THAT I'M BITTER ABOUT THAT!!
When I was in college there were so many guys in Markland named John that they would huddle together and chant about how they were John, they were a colony creature. The Borg always kind of reminded me of the John Colony, come to think of it. But it's really hard to be a colony of one. An Army of one, sure, but a colony of one? You just look like some weirdo chantiing to herself and I get that enough already.
You know the real reason that more people aren't named Leta? It's because if one is named Leta one either has to work with engineers, who don't voluntarily read anything that doesn't have a diagram, or one has to spend one's entire adult life having this conversation:
Them: Leda? Like Leda and the Swan?
Me: No. Not like that at all.
Not to mention all the hours of my life I could have back that I've spent spelling and pronouncing my name to people.
Gakked from Shelly's Cyber Chocolate.
7 comments:
Ah, but their database is flawed - wile it shows close to 138,000 people with my first name, it shows NO ONE in the US with my last name.
engineers, who don't voluntarily read anything that doesn't have a diagram
Hey, now!
According to their database there are some 121,000 (and change) Mattie's out there. But, apparently, I'm the only one with my last name. Makes me feel like Tigger.
Of course, Tiggers are wonderful things. They have clauen. Although I wonder if the foolish spelling change last generation is protecting MC from having a namesake.
As for me, it says there are nearly 5,000,000 people with my first name. That seems a bit much, even for a colony creature. Only 630 with my last name, though. And I'm guessing that the final figure of 10 may be accurate, even though I only know of one - he's a bass fisherman in FL, weirdly enough (turned up on google when I did the vanity search)
JCC
Well I've always figured that the idea was to use the weirdness level of your first name to balance out the weirdness level of your last name. You want to avoid the extremes of John Smith or Zbigniew Brzezinski. My sister was happy to go from Agenbroad to Yenča when she married. She spends less time spelling out her name, unless she tries to explain the hacek over the "c". --Jim aka Simon.
well my first name is leta but guess how much i got embarassed over it this weekend here is the story
I went to the beach and ran into a really hot guy and he asked me what my name was I told him my name and he was like "Lena, Laura, Lisa?" He didn't get so I just went with Lena
Yeah, I pretty much answer to anything that starts with an L sounds and ends with a schwa sound.
I had a great-grandmother named Lena.
:-)
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