I’m fascinated by personal names that, out of context, don’t appear to be names at all. Especially when said names are created from everyday nouns and proper nouns — places, foods, animals, objects, brands, ideas, events, institutions, organizations, qualities, phenomena, and so forth.
My fascination kicked into high gear after I wrote about noun-names earlier this year. Ever since, I’ve kept my eyes peeled for noun-names.
So far, I’ve collected hundreds. But it’s going to take me a while to blog about all of them. In the meanwhile, I thought I’d list some of the strangest ones I’ve already talked about:
- Annexation
- Cape Cod
- Captivity
- Danger
- Eclipse
- Emancipation Proclamation
- Emirates
- Eiffel Tower
- Fourth
- Freeway
- Funeral
- Gold Dust
- Golden Palace
- Halloween
- Helsinki
- Jeep
- Joker
- Key West
- Legal Tender
- Metallica
- Neon
- Nintendo
- Oleomargarine
- Opera House
- Orbit
- Oregon Territory
- Pebbles
- Peppermint
- Prohibition
- Rainbow
- Shotgun
- Skylab
- Soccer City
- Sou’Wester
- Sputnik
- Strawberry
- Suffrage
- Tahiti
- Trooper
- Tsunami
- Union Jack
- Vick Vaporup (Vicks VapoRub)
- Wilmot Proviso
- Windchime
- Zeppelin
Did I skip any good ones? Let me know in the comments!