TIL that the “S” in “Harry S. Truman” isn’t an abbreviation. His middle name was just “S”.
TIL that the “S” in “Harry S. Truman” isn’t an abbreviation. His middle name was just “S”.
There's also Ulysses S. Grant. The "S" was apparently just a mistake on his enrollment at West Point. His birth name was Hiram Ulysses Grant. He tried to switch his first and middle names, but ended up with the initials USG instead of UHG.
And then there's the odd case of "Thomas a Becket." Thomas Beket was never called Thomas a Becket in his lifetime. He apparently went by many names, one of which was "Beket," but never "a Becket."
https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2023/research/thomas-a-becket-study/
Homer Jay Simpson Or Homer J. Simpson
If his name is S why is there a period... like an abbreviation.
People are used to adding periods so they just add it in.
Source: My middle name is a letter.
Because sometimes they insist on abbreviating. It is just a stupid abbreviation.
I had a friend like this in college. His name was AJ. That's it. Just the letters.
Everyone in the department spent ages trying to guess what it stood for. I managed to glance his ID when we got lunch together once. His name was just AJ. There weren't even periods marking it as an abbreviation.
Still haven't told anyone though
S and a dot apparently.
Have an old friend/colleague with the last name Oh, share the same first name, so at work we would always say, John S., John D, John O type of deal, for some reaosn it would keep me wondering if we were really saying Oh or O. For him. (John isn't really the first name, just an example)
That also reminds me of this one public speaker back in 30 A.D. Jesus H Christ. Apparently the H is just an H. Who woulda thought.
J Moore, the Moore in the wildly used Boyer-Moore string search algorithm, has a first name of a single letter, J. It's not an abbreviation.
Moore enjoys rock climbing.[6]
This might be the most concise paragraph I've ever seen on Wikipedia!
I used to work with a guy that was from China. He only had a first in a last name. He was going to college here and the college required everyone to have a middle initial as part of their login. They just used his last initial as his middle initial.
Wait does everyone there have a middle name? I'm Dutch and I don't have a middle name. I figured that was quite common also in the English speaking world
My grandfather and father dont have a middle name.
Both Sicilian (Father born in the U.S though)
He's the only person I've known here in almost 50 years without a middle name. It's quite possible other people haven't had a middle name but it's never come up.
I don’t have either. Maybe it’s a murican thing
I have two. You can borrow one for a while.
Not that I'm aware of Gerry F. Flap.
I knew that middle names are common in the US but I didn't know it's so deep in the culture
One of those things that’s just normal so we don’t talk about it I guess.
I've usually seen NMN used for no middle name.
Poor Alex Song (A.S.S.)
Hairy Ass
Monkey D. Luffy type shit
I'd tell people my middle name was "S" too if I were a boy middlenamed Sue. How do you do?!
Better kill that son-of-a-bitch who named ya that.
Just don't underestimate them... I hear they "kick like a mule" and "bite like a crocodile"
Harry "Cool S" Truman
I'm skeptical. This could be true, or AI generated nonsense. It does link to a source, but I can't verify the source.
This is the reference. It's a dotgov.
Back in the 90’s I worked for a guy whose first name is “H”.
Pronounced as Aitch or Haitch?
Haitch
I knew an H Jay.
What a coincidence. I never knew this despite my penchant for useless trivia but just yesterday at an airport I overheard some high school kids asking each other trivial pursuit questions and this was one. The next day: this post. Uncanny.
/s
