As an example of difference, and this can be dismissed as being from abroad so not relevant to explorations of the Anglo culture, people in Asia make their names into initials if their names are hard to pronounce for foreigners.
In China, their English names are sometimes based on their Chinese names, but I've met 4-5 who shortened it to ST for example if their name would usually be ShengTong. The practice is especially prominent in Hong Kong and Singapore, and sometimes Thailand, where their English name is their initials.
Now, interestingly enough as a Malaysian the most common initialisations among the Chinese that do this I've observed are CY and PC. My parents have multiple friends named CY, I've got an uncle.
In my experience, the aforementioned ST Chan may eventually start going by Stephen Chan instead, maybe MN Lai might start calling herself Mona, but CYs very often keep those initials. Maybe because those names are particularly difficult to Anglicise?
(My sibling turned their YH into Yvonne, so there might be something to that).
To the extent that you want to equate ideograms to letters, any Chinese speaker with single character personal name and surname is going by an "initialism"... I suppose Xi Jinping could go by 习近, just Xi Jin...
No Chinese person would ever abbreviate jinping as "j"; they'd use "jp". Abbreviating that way is quite common in general, but it doesn't make sense as a spoken (as opposed to written) phenomenon.
As to names they are generally correct. A two-syllable given name is not one inseparable part; it's two separable parts.
Here are all the sons of the Hongwu Emperor's sixth son:
Zhu Mengwan
Zhu Mengwei
Zhu Mengyue
Zhu Mengcan
Zhu Mengcong
Zhu Mengjiong
Zhu Mengchao
Zhu Mengzhao
Zhu Mengguang
Zhu Mengju
Notice anything? That's not a coincidence - that middle element in all of their names is fixed by elite Chinese naming practice and, in the particular case of the Ming imperial family, required by law. On an unrelated note, the diminutive form of a Chinese name almost always derives from the second syllable (where present) and ignores the middle syllable. (And this is true regardless of social class.)
Yeah, it may be that between the Johns, Jacks, and Jays and the Juniors, it reaches some level of critical mass that it feels normal. And by definition every Junior is, from birth, in a place where they are always having to distinguish themselves from someone with the same first name.
I think you've hit on it--there are so many existing abbreviations of J first names, J middle names, and Juniors that (almost) any given J combination sounds automatically like a natural nickname.
My wife's name is Marie Jeanne and she goes by MJ. Only her parents call her Marie. I just asked her about this and her response was just that at some point around age 18, she thought it sounded cool and started using it to people in college meeting her for the first time and it just stuck.
1) notable exception for KC, often turned into a traditional name (Casey)
2) for women, at least, it’s a way of making your name much less obviously gendered. serves a similar function as a *lot* of women’s nicknames — turning the name into something shorter that doesn’t end with “a” (or often “n”). E.g. Alex (Alexandra), Charlie (Charlene), Kate (Katherine), Mel (Melissa), Jess/Jessie (Jessica), Maddie (Madeline or Madison), etc.
On 2), that is why a lot of female authors are encouraged by publishers to use their initials instead of their names or pick a gender neutral pen name (this is why it's JK Rowling and not Joanne Rowling).
In a lot of genres books by women sell worse than those written by men (or at least that used to be the case, this could easily have improved over the last decade or so).
Men in female dominated areas do the same thing; romance novels, for instance.
A rather amusing example: Mitch Larson went by M.A. Larson when making My Little Pony because his agent thought that it would be kind of embarrassing while this other show he was working on was going to be the thing that made him big and he didn't want to be overly associated with a toy show for little girls.
That other show, naturally, lasted like one season, while MLP became a huge cultural phenomenon, so he's M.A. Larson now because that's way more recognizable.
The broader point makes sense to me, but Kate seems very gendered. Never met, nor heard tell, of a man called Kate. (Though I wouldn't blink at a non-binary person going by Kate… hmmm.)
I was approaching it more linguistically, I guess, in terms of what letters names end with — I think that *actively ungendered* names like Alex/Charlie/Jessie are a separate set. But worth noting that Kate feels feminine only *culturally* — it’s hard consonants, a bold diphthong vowel, and just one syllable, which are all much more common in Europeanesque languages for male names than for female.
Also historically (though less so now) it was a strategy for African American professionals (doctors, lawyers, pators, etc) to go by their initials. A white lawyer is fairly likely to refer to the black lawyer "M.A. Brown, Esq" as "Mr. Brown," but if the white lawyer knows the M.A. stands for Marcus Allen, there's a good chance he starts calling the black lawyer "Marcus."
So I'm one. I literally wrote a small book and as a one off I signed it JD [LAST NAME], because I liked how it sounded for JD Salinger. Then I moved to a new state and decided to change my name because I liked the way it sounded, plus I liked Scrubs, and that's it. About half of the people in my life call me JD the other half call be by my real first name.
Isn't it all because of John? In France we have the exact same phenomenon, even though we don't use middle names. What we do have is "double first names" like Jean-Baptiste, Jean-Charles, Jean-Paul, Jean-Philippe, Jean-Marc, Jean-Christophe, etc. So we have JBs, JCs, JPs, etc. Notice a pattern? It's all Js, and it's all from Jean-something. It seems to me that it's a christian tradition, maybe starting with "John the baptist" (maybe even prior since HE had to be qualified beyond "just John"). For female first names we see the exact same pattern with M, for Marie. Marie-Claude, Marie-Camille, Marie-Anne, Marie-Thérèse, etc.
I came here to say the same thing. I think this is the answer. It seems especially common in French, and always because people are named Jean-Christophe etc. I guess this is how it came into North American culture. Do the JC (etc) abbreviations even exist in England?
They exist but are not very common; my guess would be that 'AJ' is the most commonly used. I definitely think Scott's observation still holds despite the lower frequency of people who are known by initials.
In Spain is mainly because of Jose (Joseph), but Juan (John) is important too.
According to the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 5 of the 10 most common names for men begin with J, and 2 of them are "double first names" with Jose (Jose, Juan, Javier, Jose Antonio y Jose Luis). Double first names with Jose are really common, including Jose Juan or Juan José.
For women, Josefa is the 5th most common name, but it's the only J.
Yeah, my completely uninformed best guess is that there is some good reason for this phenomenon in French (where it seems even more common), and the trend entered English from French cultural influence.
A French counter example: PY Gerbeau, former executive at what was then called Eurodisney. PY for Pierre-Yves. Perhaps abbreviated to make it easier for Anglophone colleagues to say (it was always "Pee Why" not "Pay Eegrek").
I've gone by "JP" for as long as I can remember - my parents certainly made that decision, and by the time I was old enough to be able to change it, it felt weird. Sometimes people call me James and that just feels weird. When our son was born, we knew we wanted to name him after my dad (James) and my wife's dad (David). We also knew we were abbreviating it, so it'd either be DJ or JD. Ultimately we went with DJ for two reasons, both fairly silly: (1) "JD" and "JP" sound too much alike when you're yelling for someone from the other side of the house, and (2) We already had a dog (Rowdy) named after a Scrubs character, and naming our son JD seemed like a little much in that regard.
Generally, I buy the "too many common names so we use abbreviations" argument, but who knows? My parents claimed they wanted the next JP Morgan. Sorry to disappoint Mom and Dad :(
My grandfather had the initials D.O.C. and went by Doc as a nickname despite having attended no college (more common in the 40’s). Relatedly, JD is not what we think of for lawyer, we think lawyer or law degree or less commonly solicitor or Esquire, whereas doctor is more synonymous with MD to the point that we have jokes about dentists and physical therapists and such not being doctors despite being medical practitioners. Similarly, the AMA seems to do a lot here to encourage that stigma with things like physician assistants and nurse practitioners having special and crappy rules and still reporting to a doctor.
Other thought, if you have three Johns in a class, John Stanley Roberts, Jonathan David Allen and Jonathan Henry Randolph, you get a solution set of John, JD and Jonathan. Add one more and you can make him a Jack. Here, you can solve for the people that fit the existing paradigm with pretty good precision. As a William, I go by Will, lots of people go by Bill and a few weirdos go by strangely unrelated things, but it’s generally a choice. Mostly people pick the nickname they want rather than letting the surrounding community decide, so usually the JD or whatever is picked by the parents or the person in question, not the class/teacher/workplace/etc.
The problem with JN, JL and JS is pronouncing those letters all start with a vowel (en, el, es) versus T and D which start with a consonant. It's awkward after J.
I had never even considered going by JL Lastname until this thread, and I agree with you that it just seems off. Jacob is already a nice two syllable satisfying name where both syllables start with a hard consonant, whereas JL just sounds like Jail; the two syllables flow together
I think sonority has something to do with it; the majority of your "good" list, if you spell them out phonetically, are two syllables and each syllable starts with a consonant, e.g. "Jay Bee", whereas the second syllable starting with a vowel is (to me, maybe I'm crazy) less sonorous, and almost unpleasant to say, e.g. "Jay Aich."
Our son is Joseph Connor Lastname. We named him with full intention of only calling him Connor. Therefore, he often identifies himself as J. Connor Lastname on formal or semi-formal communications.
GrandDad was Joseph. Dad is Joseph. I didn't want to have another Goes-By-First-Name-Joe in the family and husband felt very strongly about naming our son after his dad because they had such a close relationship. We reached this compromise. Did consider Joseph John (after my dad) to be called J.J. No idea why certain J-initial nicknaming is so common but it does roll off tongue.
My dad's family has what I think is a really good work-around to avoid the issue of first name collisions but also maintain that sort of continuity. The father's first name is made the eldest son's middle name rather than his first name. Same for the eldest daughter, but with her mom's name. Subsequent kids often get middle names pulled from other relatives. The name chain goes a fair ways back, too.
I ran into this with Social Security - their (computer, of course) system cannot handle the use of, e.g. E. Power Biggs. I wound up having my name legally changed.
My data points - know a "CB", "MB", and yes, "DJ".
That's an excellent question, and I definitely wanted to name him Connor Joseph. I'd fallen in love with the name Connor many years ago, long before it was common in America, and husband really liked that name too. Unfortunately he lost his father to cancer the year before our son was born and it became important to him to name our son after his dad as his first name. It was an uneasy compromise.
Ironically, we thought that an added benefit would be that his mother would be touched that we had honored his dad this way---instead she was really horrible and nasty about the fact that we hadn't given him the full name of her husband/son, "Joseph Michael." It literally ruined my husband's first days with his newborn after his mother yelled at him on the phone that he "didn't love his father" by giving our son that name.
Lesson learned: we will have nothing but good things to say about any name that our kids may give their own kids. Hopefully it won't be anything TOO weird, lol.
Lean heavily toward the "linguistically satisfying" explanation.
Take "H". "H" is a fairly unpleasant letter to pronounce in English. It starts awkwardly, stops flow, and doesn't connect nicely into most other letters. You almost never see people go by initials with "H" in them. Imagine someone that wanted to go by "AH", or "HC". To me, that's so awkward to say, I think people would naturally start referring to them by another name.
I know someone whose first name starts with an H and who initializes it when writing her name formally because she goes by her second name (her first name is her mom's name). Verbally she obviously just uses that second name, which ironically actually starts with 'C'.
Yes. He was always known just as "George Bush," never with the initials, until his son George W. became prominent. I checked that on Google Ngrams once.
I'm assuming you're not a time traveler from the future and we're talking about different people, which makes this even weirder, but a friend from high school went by HV, starting in elementary school, and he kept the real name a secret. Whoever knew him when he was 5 knew what it was, but they backed him up and didn't tell. I suppose by the time we're in our 80s, there won't be many left who actually know his name at all.
I'm a JP. I used to go by John Patrick (for a funny story reasons), and it was shorted by classmates when I was in early middle school. My guess is some subset of initials start to "sound like names", and then from there it becomes easier to adopt the name, leading to it becoming more common, leading to them sounding more like names, etc.
This is anecdotal, but I know several people who are "juniors" who then have their names shorted to "X initial" plus "J". For example, Theodore Junior choosing to go by "TJ" instead. I wonder if some of the initial letter shortened combinations that end in J started out as a shortening and way to avoid being called "Junior" and it entered common enough usage to be fashionable. This doesn't explain when "J" is used as the first initial though.
JD and JT are made with the front of the mouth, making them easy to say. They also have a sonorous "E" at the end, making them easy to hear. JP is pretty common too. And of course there's Jay Z. If I'd expect anyone to strategically choose their name to be easy to say and hear, it's him. Maybe the only reason JZ isn't more common is because Z isn't a common letter.
With JN, JL, and JS, you have to make a back-of-the-throad glottal stop to form the "eh" sound. Same problem with MD. And "eh" is not a very sonorous sound. I have a one-syllable short version of my first name with an "eh" vowel, and tried going by the long version for a while because I didn't like how the short version of my name sounded. It was hard for people to hear in loud environments, and sounded "small." But I had to do so much work to enforce the long version of my name that I eventually abandoned my efforts.
I think that after many years of telling people your name over and over again, many people become quite sensitized to the details of the way it sounds and is perceived by others.
I'm JV and don't like it initialised with my surname (though strictly it is JVV so maybe that is a factor, weird to only use my first middle name) and am now trying to figure out why!
- often done when someone has the same name as a parent
- more common for men than for women
- not done when the second initial is a vowel
- especially common when either initial is J
- most common with letters that are pronounced consonant-vowel (so "bee" or "kay" more than "ess" or "arr")
I wonder if J-names are specifically not merely common, but cross-generationally common, such that John is more likely to be the son of a John (and thus inclined to initialize) than Michael is to be the son of a Michael? I note that Joseph is traditionally an overwhelmingly popular middle name for Catholic boys -- but, on the other hand, Mary is even more so for Catholic girls.
Overall, I don't feel like I have a compelling explanation here, especially for the fact that initialisms are more common with J in *either* position -- J for Junior doesn't explain JD.
He picked his dog’s name at a young age, just like Indiana Jones (they were also born the same year).
C. S. is Clive Staples, and his distaste for the name can be seen even in Narnia: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
My father is John P., and I'm John R., and naming your children after yourself leads to confusion. Further, "John" was an extremely common name as I was growing up, so I was often JR. I attempt with limited success to have my middle initial on any written item. For things that use initials, I am always JRM rather than JM (and used JRM as my nom de net for a long time.)
I am very seldom referred to as JR now.
My guess is that the JD's JR's and AJ's started and people just kind of stuck with them. J does seem a little more mellifluous though that may just be usage talking.
I tend to go by JT and your first supposition was the correct. It was merely a differentiator because there tended to be 2-3 other "Justin"s in my age groups. As to why the specific lettering, I'm not sure. I'm curious if there's a harmony in choice of middle name. (Tyler, if curious)
My first and middle names are Carl Jacob, but I go by Jacob in almost every setting (my parents made that decision when I was born). For a while in elementary school I tried to make CJ a thing but it never caught on. Now with nieces, nephews, and goddaughters, JJ has become more common.
One reason I prefer JJ (and preferred CJ for a while) is that I have a speech impediment and it's not unusual for me to say "Jacob" and people hear "chicken" or something else entirely different. I find that I prefer JJ or even Carl because I can pronounce those clearly enough to avoid that awkwardness. That probably doesn't answer why J names in particular get initialed though.
My bad guess is that Johns, Jameses, Jacks, and Jefferies are more likely to be from WASPy, vaguely patriarchal families (or to have inherited their naming conventions from them) where parents are likely to name kids after their fathers. If your dad is John and you are John you can't be John, so they have to call you something else. If your dad is John Todd, and your grandad is John Todd and you are John Todd, III your options are "JT" or "Trey."
Spot on for me. I’m the third and my son is the fourth James in a row. But nobody in the family uses initials. JB doesn’t sound right to me. Instead we all use nicknames, and there are plenty to go around for ‘James’.
I think there is something linguistically satisfying about sounds like JD, CJ, etc. beyond their prevalence as initials. I actually knew a guy in my teens who went by CJ. He was black, and had a very white-scanning name which I got the impression he didn't identify much with, but notably, his real initials weren't actually C and J. His first and middle names were Carrington Harris, so apparently he decided "CJ" sounded like a decent initialism, while "CH" wasn't acceptable even if those were his real initials.
I did - first concert I ever went to. Opening acts were Vanilla Ice and En Vogue. For a lame 12 year old, that was the coolest experience of my life so far. Happily I have since had cooler ones. I think.
It was a revelation when I was in New York taking the subway around Christmas last year, noticed for the first time ever the sign where the J and Z lines run concurrent, chuckled audibly, and my wife looks over and says something to the effect of "yeah dumbass, that's what he's named for," which somehow I never knew.
I definitely noticed that "J" is disproportionately common. But I feel like I've known as many DJ's as JD's, and MJ's, TJ's, JT's, CJ's, etc. I haven't figured out if the non-J letter is disproportionate to the commonness of that letter as an initial, but J clearly is.
I've encountered people from India who use initials as their name where it's not J - an uncle of mine goes by TK, and the interim provost of my university goes by NK (I don't know if "K" is particularly common for Indian names or just a coincidence of these two).
I'm thinking about this in terms of mouth movement. In some languages (say, Korean) there's a lot of variable sounds that a letter might make, and the rule governing them comes down to something like "Korean is a lazy-mouthed language, and it's easier to make a B sound after this particular vowel sound than it is a P sound".
J seems unique to me in that "Jay" flows really easily from a lot of other sounds. so "beejay", "ceejay" and "deejay" are all relatively easy to say. Emmjay is harder, and you see it less. Aychjay is kind of hard to say, and you see it never; doubleyoujay is a lot of trouble and nobody uses it at all. Meanwhile the only thing saving us from Zeejay is that it's a little bit too futuristic-in-the-1980's sounding and there aren't that many Zachs.
I've known people who go by abbreviations without J. Including: a PC and an MD. I didn't know a KP but it was used as a nickname for a kid's show. I didn't know a DA or LA. WB was a good friend of mine and I used to call him WB (William Beverley Surname).
I think what caused it was there was a LOT of name overlap. I was once in a twenty person class where six people had the same first name as I did. This led to a lot of nicknaming to fill in the gaps. Some of it was traits or nicknames and some of it was using a unique element of the name. But yeah, it was kind of like a medieval village now that I think about it.
I wonder how much of this is people in smaller communities having more intense contact with more culturally similar people requiring more distinction through things like nicknames?
As a JP -- my parents called me that as a nickname growing up -- my belief is that it's mostly a cultural thing. I.e. there have been historical precedents that stuck (i.e. JP Morgan) and also this pattern is satisfying for the "meme brain" which may be for the reason you mention -- J is just a melodious/satisfying letter; other names have different nicknames. Also, I must invoke John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt here. But I wouldn't be surprised if there's a deeper story in our cultural history with more gravity involved somewhere. Now that I'm an adult, I just go by Jeremy. I go by Meyer (my last name) if there are multiple Jeremys. If I ever become a wealthy banker, I'll probably go by JP Meyer.
I was called JD to distinguish me from 5 other Johns in the family. In 4th grade the nuns refused to allow JD, insisting on John because of its Christian name status. Since then, both names apply depending on who is addressing me, as a JD commented earlier. At one workplace, for about 4 years, it was JL.
Before college, the only instance of this I knew was a guy named DJ. I’ve since met a CJ and an MJ. But I’ve also encountered a few people who go by triple initials—AOK and DMZ. I think the triple initials case has more to do with it also being their student username, plus some name collision, plus having the initials colliding with a real word.
Maybe part of it is linguistic. We do say PC etc but a y ending (ass in "Jay") feels "easier" to roll into another letter. PC for example seems more like two distinct and short bursts.
my take: JD, JC etc sound good. it just sounds cooler saying JD vs. John Dough. As well, theres something phonetically appealing about pairing lettings that end with certain sounds. Micheal becomes "Mikey", that familar sounding "y" at the end of something, and "Jay-Dee" just rolls off the tounge. As opposed to "Pee-Dee" or "Rrrr-Dee". I think it gets at something: theres no way to turn the name "Jason" to "jaycey" or any thing like you can with "Mike", "John" or Dave". so you just leverage the good sounding letter and use their initials. Even JR in Dallas had it!
You made us stop to think about the pattern. My guess was: nice vowels, rather after the consonant, that also work together well (the examples I thought of had different vowels with the first and the second initial, but I guess it might be the same if it sounds nice). For example TK would work well.
In practice, I can think of only one person who does this. The example fits the vowels theory and it fits the J. - theory. And somehow in this case it also sounds incredibly arrogant. ;)
The only people I know who go by initials are trans/non-binary and use their initials from their "deadnames" as their new names. This doesn't follow a pattern based on the actual lettering of the names, rather a cultural pattern.
Just to add data: when you asked me to sit and think for a bit I did, and I independently also concluded that the only people I know of that use initials as their name start with J. I have an uncle that everyone calls JB, but in his case I know it's because he's Jesse Bernard (lastname) the 5th, and when you have that many Jesse Bernards I guess it's reasonable to go by JB. I've never met anyone else with a legacy name so beats me if initializing it is a common thing.
Come to think of it, is there some connection to calling people "Junior?" Which is just spelled Jr? Does that somehow prime the English language for two letter J names?
My parents tried to get me to go by JD when I was little, thinking that I would like it, and it'd be cool, etc. The non-melodious sound bothered me intensely and i insisted they call me by my birth name around when I started preschool.
I think the melodious hypothesis matters. JN, JL, JS- all have one letter where the pronunciation begins with a vowel (en, ell, ess). JD, JT, JC- do not.
I think the bit about Jay being a name is on to something. Notably the cases that don't seem to follow this pattern are more feminine names.
I've always had a strong association between nicknames like JT/JD and a certain kind of very rough and unsophisticated machoness. I mean, I have relatives with these names/initials and it feels like the kind of thing I'd call them if we are working on some construction or farm project together (they raised a few animals on side) but would be much less likely to do so when interacting with the very same ppl in an academic or religious setting. There is a weird way it feels a bit like the encouraging non-homosexual male butt slap. Like you'd never do that to those ppl if you are congratulating them for smashing a group theory exam. Nowhere near as extreme as that but same idea.
As an actual professional group theorist, I can attest I've never seen a butt slap as a congratulations for any of my students. But who knows what happens after they leave the classroom?
My name is John David Brothers. I think of myself as John, but I typically write 'jb' at the close of my emails and a lot of people at work refer to me as jb. My wife often calls me Jay, and when I've outraged her, John David! Every once in a while she calls me JD.
Could it be simply a matter of mouth movement required? JD requires a very minimal amount of mouth movement, just mostly some minimal tongue movement behind the teeth. But when an initial ends with an eee sound, there's movement required to return to the J sound . So DJ is a little more effort than JD. CJ is similar to DJ, except that the S sound involves more breath and takes a little longer to enunciate.
Perhaps that's the simplest explanation - JD is easy to enunciate with minimal effort, and the only possible misinterpretations are JB and JT.
I lean heavily towards the satisfaction hypothesis, and particularly satisfying vowels; English speakers tend to agree on vowel order that sounds satisfying. Cf. bad big wolf, clop clip, dong ding. I'm less certain about 'ee' sounds, but 'i' sure as hell comes before 'a' or 'o' in phrases.
AFAIK the common trope is that only serial killers or other kinds of deranged assassins have three full names, e.g. "Lee Harvey Oswald". Shortening one's name to just the first and middle initial might be a way to bypass that association.
Growing up I was known by full first two names: J--- D---- and the initials.
I am even Uncle JD or Uncle J--- D---- to a dozen.
The use of both names and/or initials was to distinguish me from father, a JA and to clarify I was not a junior. I had a cousin (technically a second cuz a lot of 1st cuz and 2nd cuz are overlap) 3 years older who was a JT but also went by full J--- T-----, but also to distinguish him from his father who was a JJ. Him being a JT certainly made me being JD seem natural.
I view the initialization as less initialization than a "diminutive" form of two full names.
I've heard initials were used by working class to separate them from hoity toity upper class. Lower class not entitled to full names. (Or didn't know how to write? full name?) But I think this stigma flipped.
Agree with "stigma flipped," if I follow what you're saying. I see the initials as a marker of higher status, maybe even overrepresented in WASP culture. If we assume more J names in that culture to start with, that might be the confounding factor that drives both.
Separate thing is that initials would be blocked where the combination is rude (BJ is pointed out elsewhere in comments, and you also don't see a lot of BMs PPs etc.). Maybe there aren't a ton of rude J words.
As a phonologist, I don't intuitively think the phonological explanations are all that persuasive here, since I haven't seen a parsimonious rule proposed.
Up until 19th century few British had middle names. It was an upper class thing adopted from Italians (and French) where middle name was reference to saint.
Although it's not as commonly used these days because it can seem pretentious, practicing lawyers have traditionally identified themselves with the abbreviation "Esq." (for "Esquire") rather than referring to their degree.
J.D. rabbit hole: The J.D. is itself a relatively new degree in the U.S. It was initially created in the early 1900s, and really only cemented itself as the replacement for the LL.B. (Bachelor of Laws) in the late 1960s. Unlike other common-law countries where legal education takes place at the college-level, specialized legal education in the U.S. takes place after college so awarding a second bachelor's degree could mistakenly imply lower-level work. (Stephen Breyer, who will retire at the end of this term, is the last U.S. Supreme Court Justice to have received an LL.B. rather than a J.D.)
> Some people at the meetup thought those combinations sounded less melodious than “JD”, but I’m not really feeling it.
I am absolutely feeling it. JD rolls off the tongue, JN, JL, and JS sound awkward. Probably it's the "eh" sound. "jay-ehn", "jay-ehl", "jay-ehs" have a vowel after "ay", which is weird for English phonetics.
Also, "jay-ass" is probably somehow a racial slur.
J and K are the only letters whose pronunciation starts with a consonant and ends in an "ay" sound. Most combinations of *ay with *ee sounds harmonious and nominative to English speakers, eg JP, KD, CK, TJ, etc. Pure combinations of "*ee" can sound okay, but it's more hit or miss, and doesn't usually connote a name eg GP, CT, TV, etc.
J names are more common than K names, so most of the people with an option on pleasant sounding initialisms involve J's.
Ease of pronunciation is probably right, but there are some non-J combos that roll off the tongue, including baseball's CC Sabathia, and two singers, KD Lang and KT Osborn (though I don't know if either of the singers actually go by those initials in everyday life). And it's fictional, but the A-team's BA Backus works. One that jumps to mind that definitely doesn't sound good at all is Y.A. Tittle the former Giants quarterback. (Again, I don't know if people actually called him YA, but that definitely takes your mouth in two different directions, which is inefficient.) Of course his given name was Yelberton Abraham Tittle (no joke) so maybe it was still an improvement
The very first paragraph said "Authors who use their initials on their books (eg J.K. Rowling) don’t count, unless they also go by their initials in everyday life." I'm pretty sure most of those people didn't go round addressing each other in conversation as "J.R.R" and "W.E.B" and so on.
He specifically mentioned "JD Salinger"! as a postulated reason for popularity.
Which is patently ridiculous. For people over 70 in US, JD Crowe Heisman winner 1957 was way more famous than JD Salinger.
The problem here is with looking for a "special" reason for "random" variation. See W E Deming (and W A Shewhart).
Assuming that J is most popular initial is not likely due to a special cause ( famous person or sound), rather it is because John, James, Jospeh, Jose, Juan, Jerome, Jacques, etc make make it more likely to be common.
That is an interesting thought. As a sort of empirical check, I took a look at the 100 most popular boys names for births in the 1990s, which probably corresponds to Scott's demographic, if I remember his approximate age correctly. We find the following very uneven distribution of initial letters:
J: 22%
A: 11%
C: 9%
M: 8%
D: 7%
T: 6%
B: 6%
S: 5%
... remaining letters below 5%....
In short, an initial letter of "J" is by far the most common among men of the generation born in the 90s, the runner up ("A") being only half as common.
That all by itself would seem sufficient to explain an excess of people going by their initials having the first initial be "J". At least, one would naturally expect, if the probability of going by your initials has zero correlation to what those initials are, you would still observe initials beginning with "J" twice as often as any other letter, and at least four times as often as most letters.
I think it tends to sound better if the pronunciation of the last letter ends with a vowel. This is also why French-source words in English tend to sound better than the Germanic-source ones.
Almost everything in French ends in a vowel sound. Even if it's not spelled that way, they drop the final consonant to make it sound that way. German will end a word with five consonants in a row like "Dietzsch"
I went by J Ray in AP chemistry and tech startupry and I liked that. I never asked people to call me that elsewhere but maybe I should. John is annoyingly common and in spite of how common it is people often mishear it as Don. Having more than one bit of phonetic distance from other common words is good.
JD here. I started going by JD when I was working on a team with 3 Jeff's, which was just too confusing. My best friend in high school had called me JD once in a while, and I had another colleague who had JP on his business card, so I figured JD could be my official business name.
Funnily enough, I had a friend in middle school whom we all called KP. He was the only Kevin in the grade so it wasn't a differentiator, just a cool sounding nickname.
I'm sure there is database. Are full first and middle names distributed any differently than initials.
If all of combinations of first names with J and second names starting with D represent x% of all names how different is that from the % of initialized names that are JD.
My thought is that the prevalence of initialized names is directly related to prevalence of names which could form that initial. My hypothesis would be stated as there is no difference! ie a null hypothesis.
Only if the null hypothesis is rejected would I look for a reason.
I may have misread but SA seems to have presumed a difference and wants to know why.
Taking cue from the late and initialized W.E. Deming: don't search for a special or assignable cause unless there is first a signal that such a search might be fruitful.
vaguely related: why did 95% of late 19th century British philosophers write under such initialized names (FH Bradley, TH Green, GF Stout, CD Broad, JO Urmson, FCS Schiller, GE Moore, etc., etc.)? Seems to have been much less common in the US at the time.
John Stuart Mill signed his name "J. S. Mill" so often (even on love letters) that he unthinkingly did it on his wedding registry, and the register made him squeeze in an additional "ohn" and "tuart".
My initials are LA. I've never referred to myself like that. However, there are a number of old friends, all of whom I met in high school, who spontaneously referred to me as LA when we met, and now still do.
'J' is one one of those syllables where you often pronounce the entire letter = 'Jaye', instead of just the 'Juh' consonant sound. In contrast, the letter 'N', evokes the 'nnnn' sound more so than how it is pronounced in isolation = 'ayyn'
Thus, when 'J'-the initial is used as the most common way of addressing a person, it does not strike the average person as odd. It fits right in.
In Scott's case, the 'S' is the weird one because it evokes the 'ssss' sound more than 'ayyys'. 'A' is less worse, but there probably should be special category for vowels all together.
This is quite USA-specific, of course. In Ireland there are lots of JP (John Paul after the pope, as already mentioned), and TJ, DJ, JJ, PJ, MJ. The J could as easily be Jack, James or Joseph as John.
The reason for a double initial is partly the practice which was common of naming a boy after both their father and grandfather. It pretty much doesn't exist for girls.
I suspect it has a lot to do with it feeling weird to use initials that aren't currently popular to use. Ie. my name is Adam Ross Zerner. I would feel weird going by AR because AR isn't a thing that people go by. But if my first name was John, I wouldn't feel weird about going by JR, because JR is a thing that people go by.
That does beg the question of how eg. JR got popular in the first place. I dunno what the answer would be there. It doesn't seem too hard to bootstrap. Other trends related to popularity face the same issue, and they seem to still happen a lot.
As non-English speaker, I first encountered this by watching (dubbed into Slovak) show Step by Step. There was a kid that was called JT. I realized many years later that those were initials and not a proper name. I think it is because J is the only letter that spelled in English sounds like a proper syllable. Together with other letters, it really creates an impression of real word, unlike other combinations (such as MD, where it is obviously not-a-word)
Another supporting argument. Superman’s name is Kal-El. That sounds like a proper name. KL wouldn’t. If English would spell K as Kal instead of Key, it would make a lots of difference in the frequency of usage
Anecdotal data point: My mom is a somewhat successful playwright who goes by "CJ" instead of "Cheryl," and this is specifically because she doesn't want readers or audience members to have preconceptions about her gender.
I am known by my first name, except at work, where the initialism (MJ) is omnipresent, and plenty of people actually forget my name, and are surprised to hear it.
The company has a number of initials-identified people, most prominently the two founders, neither of whom has a J initial. I can't speak for their reasoning, but I arrived, discovered that I was one of six people (out of fewer than two hundred) with my name, and made my initials my slack handle. It's become convenient as a way to immediately know who's a work contact, and who I actually know.
We call our son EJ, because we wanted to name him Eric after me and his grandpa, but not call him Eric / not have him be a junior, although some people think EJ is for Eric Junior (it's not).
A 'CJ' here. I can confirm that my decision to initial myself (under certain conditions) is based purely on the fact that I thought my name would roll better off the tongue that way.
As an anecdote me and a friend in second grade had the same first name and both had last names starting with D, so he went by JD and I went by my regular first name.
I think there are two completely different things happening here, but both relate to fathers and sons having the same first name.
1. Where the son is whatever Junior, you get wJ to distinguish him from dad. Women don’t generally use junior.
2. I suspect that men with traditional names and men who, as a parent, favor a traditional name for their sons are overlapping sets. So you get a high overlap of men with the names John and Joseph favoring the idea of naming their son the same thing. So you get J whatever. The commonality of both John and Joseph means that there is some utility for people outside the family, to distinguish all the Johns from each other. But it’s a bit of a mystery why that logic doesn’t apply to Michael, which is slightly more common. Perhaps Michael is the second son’s name?
I think there are a more nicknames for Michael than for John. Jack, Jay, Johnny, Jock vs Mike, Mick, Mikey, Mitch, Mickey, Mitt, and even Mischa if appropriate.
Watching people post their own initials and their families’ in these comments gives me an idea for your next post.
“Isn’t it funny how social security numbers always seem to be divisible by 23? Also, your account number and your routing numbers are always coprime! If you have any counterexamples, please share!”
I think patterns that come out consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (like jay-dee or dee-dee) are a lot easier and more fluent and satisfying to say than patterns that come out consonant-vowel=vowel-consontant (like jay-ess or jay-em).
Basically, two vowel sounds in a row are difficult to make distinct from each other and are annoying to say, slow down the flow of language a bit.
Anecdotal to add, but I’ve found these sorts of letter abbreviations to be more common in the working class…though perhaps that’s just them having more kids and running into more legacy naming issues with various repeated letters of grandparents and such? And for one of Scott’s counters, I know a person who goes by DA.
An interesting point from reading other comments. There seems to be no theme or common origin story for these. Some people are picking their own, sometimes it is peers in school, and sometimes it is parental choice. Often it does seem to be doubling up or just shortening names, etc. but I find it interesting that all 3 origins of self, family, and peers occur with some high degree of frequency.
I’ve also noticed no particular pattern other than personality in who is more or less willing to change their name or not. I never really thought to alter my name in a new environment, but I know some folks who don’t really have a consistent name and it doesn’t bother them at all. Many folks have a family pet or formal name, and various nicknames amongst different peer groups.
So that’s another phenomenon…people who do not have a consistent name. Do you all know many folks like that? I.e. my college friends call me this, high school friends that, my family xyz, and my co workers abc? I’ve met many of folks who do this sort of multi name thing.
Related question I often puzzle over: there is a clear outlier among letters for starting boy’s names (J) and a clear (maybe slightly less clear) outlier for starting girl’s names (M). Why those letters?? J is pretty rare in English otherwise. Why different letters?
M for girls might have to do with Marian devotion. The letter J doesn’t really seem like it would have much connection at all to Jesus specifically.
I think the relatively high number of J names for boys in England comes from the history of widespread Christianity - The popular names James and John (which was the number 1 name for decades!) both originate from the Bible as do other names such as Jacob, Jeremy, Joshua, Joseph (whence Joe) Jedidiah, Jared and more. They were originally names in the Hebrew language that were later Hellenized, Latinized and Anglicized.
Musicality (or melody) in names is very likely an influence in this puzzle (but not the only one!) This is true with company names, product names, and person names. It's easiest to spot in the long vowel sounds, though we are also huge fans on the hard consonants.
In English, the long ē sound is the most common in pronouncing individual letters. 8 letters end with an ē sound (other E itself) are B, C, D, G, P, T, Z). Far behind with only 2 letters is the ā sound (J, K) and ū sound (Q, W). And ī sound is only present in one other letter, Y.
If you look some of the popular name initial combos, they're most often an alternation of only two pairings:
ā + ē (JT, JD, JB or JāTē, JāDē, JāBē)
ē + ā (CJ, TJ or CēJā, TēJā)
We also have biases when choosing boys and girls names at least in the US, current generations. You'll find doubles of the *same* long vowel sounds in girls names or nicknames (Mimi, Coco, Cece, Edie, Kiki, Dee Dee) because historically we have found them cute in a feminine way. This same long vowel pattern seems much more rare in boys names or nicknames.
But these common initial names seem like a parallel masculine cute - JB, JT, JD et al - and often are handed out to boys when they're, well, young boys. It's cute, but boy cute.
Go into individual communities - ethnic, social - and you'll find unique patterns. And as noted, lots of the popularity of these patterns are generational in the U.S. They can be dominant for period and then nearly disappear a few decades later.
I know a ton of people who go by M initials without a J. (MK, MC, even an MB). But these are all Marys, and I am very Catholic, so this might be specific to that context.
This discussion could benefit from data. Does anyone have access to a db of people's informal names which is at all representative of current U.S. population?
Another interesting pattern is that those names have different stress patterns. For me, I put more stress on the second letter in JD, JR, JT, but more stress on the first letter in CJ, AJ, etc. So the J is always less stressed that the other initial. Do others also pronounce them this way?
Yes that‘s interesting, and nobody else here has noted it as far as I can see. I suspect that indeed the J never gets the emphasis (but I‘m not a native English speaker). My general take would be that it is well-suited as a companion sound because of the effortless-throwaway nature of the vowel part and the smoothness/flair of the consonant part.
Ugly combinations are generally less likely, e.g. the JN, JL, JS mentioned by Scott, where the second letter starts with another vowel part (as others have noted).
EA says above: „JL doesn‘t sound good, so there‘s JLo“. That‘s a „counterexample“ because the J in JLo gets the emphasis (I think). But then the vowel part of „Lo“ has the same effortless-throwaway nature, and perhaps the consonant part is equally smooth, so it makes sense for the emphasis to default on the first letter, as in JJ.
EDIT: contradicting what I just wrote, Jay Kay of Jamiroquai, emphasis on Jay even though Kay is not smooth.
I am trying to decide if nomitive determinism is once again at work, in that if you went by initials you'd be an "SA essayist" or if you used your real name and preferred sub-genre, an "SS apologist". It would go a long way to explaining why bad-faith readings by culture warriors keep coming to such weird conclusions about your "real" political alignment.
I answer as AJ as readily as to my given name, but only my close family, because my grandfather was a racer and was fond of A.J. Foyt. When I was taking a post-secondary class, I had the instructor call me AJ to see if I liked it. It was fine, but not worth pursuing.
One issue is that, for professional work, I didn't like the sound of the initialism with my monosyllabic last name.
"But then how come there are so few JNs, JLs, or JS’s?" JN sounds like Jane, JL sounds like jail, JS sounds like Jess. Pretty obvious why they are not being used not sure if you were joking or not. On another note LT was a famous football player, then another famous football player, and I've now met a guy in real life who is also called LT, possibly in homage. Maybe some of these get popular because of famous person xyz?
I'm a JG. I don't really introduce myself as it but it's a nickname a lot of friends use (as well as my mother and brother). I've got a double-barrelled first name, hyphenated, and it's the initials of those.
I can't say I'd observed the prevalence of J in the past. I'm wracking my brains for examples but I can't think of anyone else I know in real life who goes by their initials, J or otherwise.
I do indeed feel JD over JL, JN or JS. I resent the back to back vowels that either slur together or force me to make an artificial break between them to articulate each individual letter. JD or JT doesn't have this problem, and the final "ee" sound feels friendly. Similarly the final J in CJ or DJ feels friendly. J is just a folksy letter for reasons I can't articulate.
When I'm thinking of names for potential children I might have, I do consider the appeal of the first two initials plus the last name, or the appeal of the middle initial between the first and the last name. I have some family members that I would otherwise like to commemorate by giving my child their first name as a middle name, but will probably decide against for initial-letter euphony (against N's, eg)
My father told me a story about one of his war buddies (supposedly, although it sounds more like a Reader's Digest Humor in Uniform story) named R B Donnelly. The US military couldn't handle single letter names, so his name was officially R(only) B(only) Donnelly, which is how he became known as Ronnelly Bonnelly Donnelly.
There's probably two basic categories of people who use their middle initials -- those whose names are too common like John (J K) Simmons or John (J R R) Tolkein, and those whose names are too embarassing like Orenthal Simpson and Pelham Wodehouse.
Here's a really cool paper by Michael Ramscar et al. on how information theoretic pressures shape name grammars to ease processing and retrieval, and how state legislation has recently disrupted this in the West (as in, in the last few hundred years): https://cogsci.mindmodeling.org/2013/papers/0578/paper0578.pdf
For me as a linguist, what Ramscar and other likeminded researchers are doing is easily the most fascinating development in current linguistics. As a longer and more comprehensive introduction to this line of thought, I can recommend this working paper which gives an updated take on name grammars and shows the same type of thing happening in other areas of language: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1904/1904.03991.pdf
So knowing that naming practices are finely attuned to the extant distribution of names in a given community, I'm wondering whether something like this is behind the J*/*J thing too? Sort of in the direction of "some people theorized that J names (eg John, Jack, etc) are so common that their holders need to differentiate themselves".
Or maybe it's just that some of these are more entrenched and it's a positive feedback loop, in which case I agree it's intriguing that they seem disproportionately likely to contain a J.
FWIW, the French fairly often give hyphenated first names, and while I haven't checked any statistics, I feel like Jean-* would come out on top. So J strikes again there.
Checking a list of NFL football players that I happened to have, I count 36 who use initials as their first name (including 2 who spell them out).
6 AJ
6 CJ
6 TJ
3 DJ
3 KJ
2 JJ
1 AC
1 DK
1 EJ
1 JD
1 JK
1 JP
1 OJ
1 TY
1 CeeDee
1 DeeJay
That's 5 people with J as the first letter, 29 with J as the second letter (including 1 spelled and 2 named JJ who overlap with the first group), and 4 people without a J (including 1 spelled). Just one JD (McKissic).
(There were also 2 people named "Jay" that I did not include because AFAICT that is their actual given name.)
I have a friend from Nashville who named his son something which could be abbreviated 'DJ' which pleased him because, as he said, "That's close to JD which in Nashville is a holy abbreviation because of Jack Daniels." My personal stereotype of people who go by JD/CJ/whatever is of good-old-boy southern types, so maybe good ol Jack Daniels is the root of it all?
And for what it's worth, I have a female friend whose initials are KP and that's generally what she goes by in our friend group.
Your "1% anything else"-assumption may hold true for 2022 America.
But instead of relying on your flawed intuitions on the matter, you should check a more scholarly source on the historical context. I refer to the venerable & all devouring Pop-Culture wiki, of course.
Under "Real Life - Other Famous Individuals" (as opposed to "Real Life - Writers" which seem to follow their own conventions) it actually has 55% percent people "Only Known by Initials", who do not have a "J" in their initials. Specifiaclly I counted 21 out of 40 examples given.
If I include the second entry with the "sportsmen", the "J"-camp gets bolstered by 7 more AJs.
In the discussion page on this article, Alvin sagely asks "Why so many A.J.s?".
Why indeed? Perhaps it's best to ignore them as outliers and ballplayers.
However, if we do not, that still leaves the non-J fraction with a considerable 44% representation. Far greater than your estimated 1%.
They do not sub-categorize between extant and extinct initial holders. With a bit of research this could easily be done, however it's unclear if this list would be representative for the general population.
The non-J fraction includes specifically:
Brigitte Bardot: If you said B.B. in the Fifties and Sixties everyone knew you were referring to her.
C. C. H. (Carol Christine Hilaria) Pounder, actress
CC (Carsten Charles) Sabathia (Jr.) - retired pitcher for several MLB teams, most notably the New York Yankees. Unlike most examples of this trope, he chooses not to use periods.
D. B. (Daniel Bernard) Sweeney, actor
D. L. (Darryl Lynn) Hughley, actor, comedian and political commentator
D. W. (David Wark) Griffith
G. W. (George William) Bailey, actor
K. C. (Kristina Cassandra) Concepcion, a Filipino actress.
Subverted with late professional basketball player and coach K. C. Jones. "K.C." is his real name.
Louis C.K., born Louis Székely (pronounced "SEE-kay").
L. (Lafayette) Ron Hubbard, creator of Scientology
Inverted with actress Maggie Q. "Q" stands for "Quigley".
M. Night Shyamalan - real name Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan; the "Night" was substituted for his middle name just to sound cool.
P. K. (Pernell-Karl Sylvester) Subban, defenseman for the NHL's New Jersey Devils (and previously the Nashville Predators and Montreal Canadiens), who happens to share his initials with an ice hockey special team (penalty kill) to the amusement of color commentators.
P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum, founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus
P. Z. (Paul Zachary) Myers
S. E. (Sarah Elizabeth) Cupp, political commentator
T. K. (Thomas Kent) Carter, actor
W. C. Fields - real name William Claude Dukenfield, American comedian and actor
W.C. (William Christopher) Handy, Father of the Blues.
W.E.B. (William Edward Burghart) DuBois, sociologist and co-founder of the NAACP.
Arguably this list is also missing "Marshall Bruce Mathers III" who also goes by Eminem or M&M. Though perhaps they did not think it appropriate to count a Rap God as an "Other Famous Indiviual", given that divinity transcends mere mortal fame.
I shall abide by TV-Tropes' scholarly authority in this Marshall matter.
Seems like entertainers raise the same issue that Scott brought up about writers in the first paragraph of the OP: how many of them actually go by their initials in everyday life? It seems to me that people with public names often style them to be distinctive, which by definition makes them unrepresentative of the general public.
TV Tropes doesn't exclusively list "entertainers" as such.
Though (or people with brand-awareness) might be overreprsented in it?
Then again, such attributes (being an enertertainer, being brand-aware) do tend to help make you famous in the first place.
Though the explanation for going by initials in general, is wanting to be distinctive, anyway. Why would only J-people want to do this?
However, I still think that Scott might be vastly underestimating the 1%-non-J-initials group. Perhaps J-initials are overrepresented or his experience is non-representative.
Doctors would want to go by initials, because they're short on time and their cultural mileu is influenced by Scrub's JD.
J.D. could also of course stand for "Junior Doctor", so we get a normative determinism-angle.
Personally I think the theory in the Reddit-thread is just wrong:
"Hey Reddit, why are some sets of initials commonly used as names, like "JD" and "CJ," but you never hear of initial sets outside of that very common group of names?"
Or not sufficiently quantified to be... all that right. Obviously it's not "never" for the non-Js. This is somewhat finnicky to figure out, as you can't just check a phonebook for this?
Personally, I don't know a single person that goes by their initials, as this is not done in Germany or German-speaking countries to my knowledge.
I go by just my first name, by initials I'm a 'JP' but not a 'John Paul.' I think most JPs are John Paul, right? Are other initialized names bounded mostly to just one set of first/middle like that?
My mother was responsible for my T.J. She was an Irish immigrant to USA in 1939, She married my dad in 1943 and they took turns naming Irish Catholic boys over the next eight years. It was his turn when i arrived in 1951, but she disliked the choices. I was named for my Uncle Tom Elliott, a D Day infantryman who became a NYC cop. But my mother being Irish associated 'Tom' with a young turkey and Tommy was a British soldier -- anathema to someone from an Irish nationalist family. Thus when my Dad walked into the room after my entry into the world (Fathers did NOT go into the delivery room in 1951 in The Bronx) my mother coyly basked, "How do you like our T.J.?" And it stuck.
But... I thought my name unique in the USA for decades until I traveled in 1982 to meet the family ion the other side. Walking up Grafton Street in Lindy one afternoon, I heard someone call 'T.J.!" I turned around quickly and so did a dozen other men. T.J. is a VERY common name in Ireland and now in the States as well.
Late to the thread, but I think "J" is the central thing here. "x-J" is also common.
I once helped a friend in Maryland restoring a house over the summer. We had some local kids as laborers -- AJ, RJ, TJ and PJ. We collectively called them "The Darrells"
They were good kids, very rural -- one guy had always walked to school with a .22 rifle in case he spotted some small game on the way. Checking the rabbit snares too.
A few had grown up pretty rough, the fact they were still fundamentally good people, despite some dire circumstances, really impressed me.
WASP businessmen in the earlier part of the 20th Century tended to be named John or James or William (but saying the initial W takes more syllables than saying the full name) and have not uncommon surnames like Smith and Hamilton. So they tended to use their middle initial and sometimes both initials became a kind of knickname for them.
Calling business executives J.D. or J.T. was a thing in the postwar era. It's parodied in the Broadway musical with the late Robert Morse, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It's chummier than calling them, say, "Mr. Rockefeller," but less presumptuous than calling them Jack or Jim.
I've used the username "thequux" online for the last two decades, give or take, and I've never been fully comfortable with my given name. Unfortunately, "the quux" sounds very egotistical when used as a name, so I shortened it to "TQ", and that's how pretty much everybody but the governments and my bank know me. It does have the benefit of being short and relatively unique, but it does frequently get mistaken for "TK" by Germans. I've never quite understood why.
A couple whole generations of British men used initials as their bylines, especially but not solely authors. Not universally but with extraordinary frequency. Many of them have been named here: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, G.K. Chesterton, W.H. Auden, P.G. Wodehouse, A.A. Milne, W.B. Yeats, T.E. Lawrence, H.H. Asquith.
I think they were taught to write their names this way at school, and then just got used to it and kept it up. I've never seen this point discussed, though.
But they don't qualify for what Scott is talking about, because so far as I know, none of the above were known to intimates by the initialisms. Auden and Milne were known by their first names, Wystan and Alan. (Auden was very proud of being the only Wystan he knew - it's an Anglo-Saxon royal name that his father, an antiquarian, liked.) Tolkien was known, when a first name was to be used, as Ronald, his first middle name, although he had school friends who did call him "J.R. Squared" as a joke. Others used nicknames: C.S. Lewis was Jack, P.G. Wodehouse was Plum; in both cases they hated their legal first names (Clive and Pelham).
I knew you were going for J. But off the top of my head without thinking too hard: P. G. Wodehouse, E. O. Wilson, V. M. Straka, MJ Watson, B. F. Skinner, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, D. H. Lawrence... yeah, British people mostly.
I think a lot of people want the feeling of having chosen their own name, but don't want to do anything too weird, so they'll find a way to derive their given name into a nickname they think is still normal. Why the popular ones got popular in the first place I don't know, but the J prevalence is probably due mostly to the historical abundance of J names. This goes for the CJs and AJs, too - I swear, when I was growing up over half the guys I knew had the middle name "James", and that's just one J!
In high school, I went by [first initial][last initial]. Not sure how it started, but I liked it more than any other alternative I could derive so I let it stick. I just go by my first name now, though.
In portuguese, I can only think of examples with J as well: JP (João Pedro/Paulo), JC (João Carlos) and JM (João Marcos). The only common exception is PH (Pedro Henrique).
(I'm obviously ignoring soccer players, some of which are commonly referred by their initials + shirt number. E.g., Critiano Ronaldo is CR7.)
>"But then how come there are so few JNs, JLs, or JS's? Some people at the meetup thought those combinations sounded less melodious than 'JD', but I’m not really feeling it."
I am. "Jay Dee" and "Jay Tee" both have a consonant sound after a vowel sound. "Jay En", "Jay El", and "Jay Ess" all have a vowel sound after a vowel sound.
(So does "Jay Arr" though, but otoh I don't think I've ever heard of a JR apart from JRR Tolkien.)
i can think of several famous basketball players (KG, KD, AD) who go by first + last initial when the two flow in a similar pattern to some of the common J pairings. Can’t think of any who go by such pairings when they don’t flow that way. I suspect being a famous basketball player makes it fine/advantageous to have an unusual two-letter pairing, but people still gravitate to similar sounds because they really are linguistically satisfying.
> Consider people who go by their first and middle initials
I "knew" someone called JT (never actually met him), but in that case only the J was an initial. It stood for "James the Third". Other double-letter names in my life have been AJ, CJ, and JJ.
My instinct says that such a name shouldn't end with a vowel. But I wouldn't be surprised by e.g. an LZ. I suspect that the uneven distribution is, as you suggest, driven more by which people are willing to use letter names than by which letter names people are willing to accept.
To be fair, even as a non-native English speaker I still feel I agree with the melodious hypothesis: those examples just sound better to me. I suppose I might be just as conditioned as people who've heard these names from infancy, but I think I can still tentatively buy this hypothesis.
Curiously, the only person I knew back in Portugal who went by initials was a CJ (pronounced similarly to "say jaw-tuh"... I'd be surprised if this were related to the English phenomenon (plus it's just one data point), but there's that.
Interesting - my own observation years ago was that it's common when the *second* initial is a J, and very uncommon otherwise. I have a PJ in my family, and I've come across lots of people (and fictional characters) called PJ, AJ, TJ, CJ, DJ, BJ (even though it sounds rude), and so on. Mainly men, but not exclusively.
I was surprised to hear you say it's also common when the *first* initial is a J. I don't recognise that at all, but maybe it's a pond difference (I'm in the UK).
A handful of counterexamples, though:
* I know a woman called Mary-Ann who goes by MA in everyday life (and she does have an MA degree, although she didn't when she first started going by the nickname)
* The character AK Yearling in My Little Pony, who goes by AK in conversation (although maybe that doesn't count because she's obviously named after JK Rowling, even though Rowling doesn't go by JK)
* A former Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, called PW Wood, who apparently was addressed as PW in everyday life, despite the awkwardness of pronouncing "W".
My first name begins with the letter <G>, and I've often thought that my name sounds particularly euphonious when rendered as "G. <Middle name> <Surname>". So maybe there's something specific about the "j" sound that makes it well-suited to English initialisms.
This pattern is not common in Poland, probably because our names for letters are much less catchy.
However, I know about at least one Andrzej (spelled 'Anjay') whom everybody started calling JJ at some point, although I don't know how often something like that would happen if they didn't hear about any JJs in the anglophone world.
Anecdata, I have one family member who goes by his first two initials, and it's "JO," which fits the "J" theory, although his stated reasons are not liking his (somewhat unusual) given names.
I guess the prevalence of J_ doesn't shock me--it does sound melodious when pronounced, but also J is the most common first initial, so we would expect more J__ than anything else even if people were choosing to initialize at random. (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/347668.html) It's also particularly a more common first initial for men, and I going by your first two initials is a bit more masculine-coded.
Although to be fair most were firsty-lasty and I never heard any go by their initials. One went by his middle name for so long that I didn't even know his first name was Ben.
English has a lot of names but very few words that start with a J. Maybe that's part of the reason why it works well with initials - there are few actual initialisms (or whatever they're called) that one could be confused for. As in: it's clear why nobody would want to go by "BS" or "BO" or "PP" or "OD", etc., while there are few such cases that feature the letter J.
And then there is Izaak Maurits Kolthoff the analytical chemist. Chemistry grad students would roam around Koltoff Hall with their steaming thermoses of liquid oxygen wearing “I M Koltoff and you’re not” T-shirts under their lab coats.
I know one Danielle who goes by "Dee" almost exclusively IRL, and have a colleague named Dan who signs his emails and IMs "-d" (not just a boilerplate signature, he types it). Apart from those, it is generally Jays of various kinds.
There's a slight variation though where the first letter is pronounced in English the same (or nearly the same) as the actual first syllable of the person's name. I know a Celia who's often called "Cee" and a Beatrice who's called "Bee". Those feel more like shortening Emily to "Em", but for ease of typing electronically they often are written with just one letter.
I go by "DJ" and have since I was born. The reason being that my D first name is one Grandpa's first name and the J middle name is the other Grandpa's first name.
JH here... Tongue in cheek..... I notice that it seems especially American (USA) to abreviate and shorten given names. Who doesn't call Robert Rob or Bob? Mike instead of Micheal (except my gay friend Michael ;-). We're an informal country and don't want to waste our breath being overly respectful. My Nebraska in-laws finally confessed they didn't want to call me by my given and preferred name James; they preferred Jim, and I was pleased to think that Jimbo or Jimbob would be too much effort for them.
I'm unlucky enough to be a KP. Had my grandmother insisted on my great-grandfather's real name (Jakob) at my inception, instead of his nickname (Koby) I would have been a JP. My life would have been different, but I don't know how. A literary note: Some publishers used to think a female author might sell more books if she used initials or, in one famous case, a gender-neutral middle name. Would 'To Kill a Mockingbird' by 'Nell Lee' have been taken as seriously or sold tens of millions of copies? Toni Morrison, on other hand, may have had it both ways.
My first and middle initials are JM — I don’t introduce myself as JM, but my family refers to me that way. Also, my father, late grandmother, and son all have the initials JH, but only my son gets referred to that way. I think it’s a family thing — kind of a nickname, and partly to differentiate people with the same first name.
I know a Charles Cameron who sometimes gets called “CC.”
Funny, I observed a similar thing in Germany. I know JTs and JPs. And they are pronounced in an English/American way.
I think it is because their double name, eg Jan-Thomas or Jens-Peter would be too bourgeois/aristocratic, especially in their youth/ teens. So it stuck by them. And yes the English j sound does sound smooth and cool.
I'm surprised to see that. I knew a German girl who spoke very good English except that she couldn't pronounce J or Th. (Her name was Jenny, but I don't remember how she pronounced it.)
There was a long time when John was very dominant as a first name. I think that may have cemented the J thing before other names became more common. Now it's just a tradition.
As for the other involved letters, I wouldn't be surprised if the phenomenon is most common where both the first and middle names are common. JD = John David + others adopted since JD is now familiar?
The real question is, why are dual-initial nicknames so much more common for men than women? Aside from writers who use initials on their books, it's very rare to see a woman using one.
The only predominantly-female one I can think of is K.C., but that's because it sounds like "Casey" (which is mostly a girl's name, though it's gender neutral enough that it's not weird to see a boy named Casey). And even that isn't especially common. Maybe M.J. as well, short for Mary Jane (owing to Spider-Man and/or weed culture?), but that's iffier.
I would compare this pattern to how irregulars spread in the English past-tense, as described in Pinker's book, Words and Rules. He talks about how we generalize from irregulars in a kind of statistical, family-resemblance fashion. For example, "wear" took on the past tense "worn" by analogy with "bear."
Similarly, once "J" got established as something common in names, it could spread because names gain the statistical pattern/ family resemblance of having "J" in them. It sinks in that this is a pattern names can take, and so other people follow the same pattern.
The point: this may just be the result of how patterns spread in language.
This is US-specific, but it used to be much more common to name your children after presidents. Andrew Jackson was a very common honoree, as was Thomas Jefferson. They inspired several generations of A.J.s and T.J.s., and I wouldn't be surprised if they wore a groove for those two combinations. G(eorge) W(ashington) was of course also incredibly popular but that doesn't seem to have stuck. In that case I suspect the two-syllables made for better nicknames than the four in G.W. Easier to just call the kid George or Wash.
I'm a "Jon", and have had multiple friend groups over the years independently converge to calling me by my full name, "Jon Simon". Their reasoning was basically that "Jon" sounds too generic, and the full "Jon Simon" rolls off the tongue well.
I am familiar with three “JC”’s. Not including myself. All different social circles. And I’m not a popular guy. Each is the first name-last name abbreviation.
My given name is Donald (like the duck) Howard (like the duck). I went by Donnie most of my life. After Trump ran for president, I got tired of people assuming that my sharing his name would make for fun small talk. So I started going by D.H.
One surprising finding: baristas and customer service reps asked me to repeat "Donnie" to make sure they heard it correctly about 60% of the time. The rate when giving "D.H." as my name is close to 0%.
But I'm not sure I would have felt it was a realistic option if D.H. Lawrence hadn't already existed.
In South India, men will use their initials irrespective of the specific letters. This is true in modern and traditional (post-colonial) context. DK (Dinesh Karthik) and KL (Kannaur Lokesh Rahul) are Indian cricket players, many prominent musicians use initials as well. This is probably to save time because South Indian names are notoriously long.
I long noticed it, but only thought of it about where the J comes second. Here's the catalogue of "second J" names like this I know of (of either personal acquaintances or famous people, in books, etc.)
Perhaps "J" isn't that common a letter in abbreviations of everyday things and institutions? So when you initialize your two first names it doesn't sound wrong? Per example: "DA", "SA", "BS", "FL", "CA", "MS", "AA", "NO" all make me think of something else, so they might expose the name to ridicule; "JJ" and "JC" and "JD" do not.
The commonness of CJ hits me a lot—I'd estimate around three-quarters of people I introduce myself to as "CZ" (initials of a Chinese name) think my name is "CJ" and it normally takes me two to three attempts to correct them, drawing the second letter in the air and pronouncing it emphatically as "zed" before explaining that "zee" and "zed" are equivalent and I respond to both.
Reason for initialising: "Chuan-Zheng" is a mission to pronounce for English speakers (I grew up in New Zealand), and although I stuck with the original until around the end of high school, eventually I started letting people call me by my initials to make things easier, and to evade questions about an "English name" or having people attempt to shorten it to "Chuan" (which my family is particular about not permitting). I suspect this is an unusual case though, at least in the context of JDs, JJs, CJs and AJs.
It's worth pointing out that names like AJ or JD are not so often the choice of the person named and more often the choice of parents and peers. Though this may simply reintroduce the same problem at a different etiological level, there is a slight difference in naming intent from others versus the self. J names are the most common by far in the English speaking world--one source says 11%--so giving others an initialization may be a way of creating greater distinction. Though almost all initializers are J's, not all J's are initializers. The Linguistic device could simply be an outgrowth of the original purpose of naming: distinction.
In American Football, the Watt brothers were named Justin James (JJ), Trent Jordan (TJ), and Derek John (who does not go by DJ). JJ Watt and TJ Watt are All Pro and signed $100M+ deals. Derek Watt has not done as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One of the few people I know who does this is my house mate PC, and that's mostly becuse she has a malaysian name and lives in an english speaking country, so PC is more familar to most people. I suspect the observation you are making is dominated by the fact that J is overrepresented as the initial of names (anecdotal experience, I don't have any evidence to back that up.)
Not many of these begin with consonants whose pronunciation begins with a vowel sound (F H I L M N R S X).
I haven't seen much mention here of double letters, like BB. These seem fairly common,. Sometimes they get rewritten, as with DeeDee. My first name is Jay, and I've often been called JJ, even though my middle initial is not J, so maybe I'm overly aware of this.
I don't feel that this conversation can be complete with Bubba. For that matter, GiGi & DiDi too (Grandmother and or Great-Grandmother - depending...).
Then all the variations on Shakespeare's first name seems adjacent, when you have Willy & Billy & Will & Bill & Gil & Liam & Pim & Buddy & Bud.
Santiago to Jimmy & Jim.
Seems like some of it can trace back to the power of names; don't tell them your right name, no, no, no! Did it start with the old writings that skipped vowels? (Yes, this whole is mostly in jest, but especially this last.)
My grandmother used to call me JW, my initials from my first and middle names. But she only did it when I was in trouble. It never occurred to me to adopt it as my name, but I wouldn't have hated it. It almost actively avoids rolling off the tongue like JD, but that's part of the allure for me.
My real first name begins with J, and I've had a series of "J-something" nicknames all my life. It's just a syllable people really, really love to say. Always struck me as odd that myself and my fellow Js got the treatment and no-one else did, and I love that I'm now reading a post by a non-J dedicated to such a specific little facet of my life, and in ACX of all places.
As an example of difference, and this can be dismissed as being from abroad so not relevant to explorations of the Anglo culture, people in Asia make their names into initials if their names are hard to pronounce for foreigners.
Where in Asia? That's not Chinese practice at all - the normal thing is to adopt an English name for the benefit of foreigners.
In China, their English names are sometimes based on their Chinese names, but I've met 4-5 who shortened it to ST for example if their name would usually be ShengTong. The practice is especially prominent in Hong Kong and Singapore, and sometimes Thailand, where their English name is their initials.
Now, interestingly enough as a Malaysian the most common initialisations among the Chinese that do this I've observed are CY and PC. My parents have multiple friends named CY, I've got an uncle.
In my experience, the aforementioned ST Chan may eventually start going by Stephen Chan instead, maybe MN Lai might start calling herself Mona, but CYs very often keep those initials. Maybe because those names are particularly difficult to Anglicise?
(My sibling turned their YH into Yvonne, so there might be something to that).
"How come "M" doesn't have the same initializing allure?" well there's MJ. Oh wait...
Side note: a fair number of people who casually use "XJ" are actually "X, junior". Think AJ Soprano.
I wonder if Xi Jinping ever thought of going by "XJ"
JP, surely!
To the extent that you want to equate ideograms to letters, any Chinese speaker with single character personal name and surname is going by an "initialism"... I suppose Xi Jinping could go by 习近, just Xi Jin...
No Chinese person would ever abbreviate jinping as "j"; they'd use "jp". Abbreviating that way is quite common in general, but it doesn't make sense as a spoken (as opposed to written) phenomenon.
Isn't that because they think of Mandarin as being made up of characters rather than words as it in fact is?
As to names they are generally correct. A two-syllable given name is not one inseparable part; it's two separable parts.
Here are all the sons of the Hongwu Emperor's sixth son:
Zhu Mengwan
Zhu Mengwei
Zhu Mengyue
Zhu Mengcan
Zhu Mengcong
Zhu Mengjiong
Zhu Mengchao
Zhu Mengzhao
Zhu Mengguang
Zhu Mengju
Notice anything? That's not a coincidence - that middle element in all of their names is fixed by elite Chinese naming practice and, in the particular case of the Ming imperial family, required by law. On an unrelated note, the diminutive form of a Chinese name almost always derives from the second syllable (where present) and ignores the middle syllable. (And this is true regardless of social class.)
True, though I still think in general my point holds.
He's called uncle eleven for a reason, you know.
Yeah, it may be that between the Johns, Jacks, and Jays and the Juniors, it reaches some level of critical mass that it feels normal. And by definition every Junior is, from birth, in a place where they are always having to distinguish themselves from someone with the same first name.
I think you've hit on it--there are so many existing abbreviations of J first names, J middle names, and Juniors that (almost) any given J combination sounds automatically like a natural nickname.
My wife's name is Marie Jeanne and she goes by MJ. Only her parents call her Marie. I just asked her about this and her response was just that at some point around age 18, she thought it sounded cool and started using it to people in college meeting her for the first time and it just stuck.
I think the J might be from junior—dad is Carl, kid is Carl Junior, CJ for short.
I doubt many kids in the US call themselves Carl Jr. They'd suffer from endless jokes about fast food.
I could believe it happens on the east coast. Carl's Jr is mostly a western U.S. phenomenon: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/63291/whats-difference-between-hardees-and-carls-jr
1) notable exception for KC, often turned into a traditional name (Casey)
2) for women, at least, it’s a way of making your name much less obviously gendered. serves a similar function as a *lot* of women’s nicknames — turning the name into something shorter that doesn’t end with “a” (or often “n”). E.g. Alex (Alexandra), Charlie (Charlene), Kate (Katherine), Mel (Melissa), Jess/Jessie (Jessica), Maddie (Madeline or Madison), etc.
On 2), that is why a lot of female authors are encouraged by publishers to use their initials instead of their names or pick a gender neutral pen name (this is why it's JK Rowling and not Joanne Rowling).
In a lot of genres books by women sell worse than those written by men (or at least that used to be the case, this could easily have improved over the last decade or so).
Men in female dominated areas do the same thing; romance novels, for instance.
A rather amusing example: Mitch Larson went by M.A. Larson when making My Little Pony because his agent thought that it would be kind of embarrassing while this other show he was working on was going to be the thing that made him big and he didn't want to be overly associated with a toy show for little girls.
That other show, naturally, lasted like one season, while MLP became a huge cultural phenomenon, so he's M.A. Larson now because that's way more recognizable.
Whoops!
The broader point makes sense to me, but Kate seems very gendered. Never met, nor heard tell, of a man called Kate. (Though I wouldn't blink at a non-binary person going by Kate… hmmm.)
I was approaching it more linguistically, I guess, in terms of what letters names end with — I think that *actively ungendered* names like Alex/Charlie/Jessie are a separate set. But worth noting that Kate feels feminine only *culturally* — it’s hard consonants, a bold diphthong vowel, and just one syllable, which are all much more common in Europeanesque languages for male names than for female.
The man would just spell the same (nick)name as Keith.
or Sue. I've only heard of one boy named Sue.
Also historically (though less so now) it was a strategy for African American professionals (doctors, lawyers, pators, etc) to go by their initials. A white lawyer is fairly likely to refer to the black lawyer "M.A. Brown, Esq" as "Mr. Brown," but if the white lawyer knows the M.A. stands for Marcus Allen, there's a good chance he starts calling the black lawyer "Marcus."
Anecdata:
My son goes by "CJ" and has since forever. His full name is "Christopher James." Mostly this was a shortening activity.
He's met a number of CJs since, though obviously he's paying more attention to that letter combination.
I think there probably *IS* something about the letter "J" working well here (both as a first letter and as a second), but I don't have any idea why.
The was a CJ in The West Wing...
> His full name is "Christopher James." Mostly this was a shortening activity.
The traditional way to shorten that would be "Chris", which is half the length.
> The traditional way to shorten that would be "Chris", which is half the length.
Grandma looked at him when he was born and said, "He looks like a CJ." And this was pretty obvious when she said it. He didn't look like a "Chris."
Some of his baseball teammates have tried "Siege" (which sounds out as shorter than CJ), but this never stuck.
So I'm one. I literally wrote a small book and as a one off I signed it JD [LAST NAME], because I liked how it sounded for JD Salinger. Then I moved to a new state and decided to change my name because I liked the way it sounded, plus I liked Scrubs, and that's it. About half of the people in my life call me JD the other half call be by my real first name.
Isn't it all because of John? In France we have the exact same phenomenon, even though we don't use middle names. What we do have is "double first names" like Jean-Baptiste, Jean-Charles, Jean-Paul, Jean-Philippe, Jean-Marc, Jean-Christophe, etc. So we have JBs, JCs, JPs, etc. Notice a pattern? It's all Js, and it's all from Jean-something. It seems to me that it's a christian tradition, maybe starting with "John the baptist" (maybe even prior since HE had to be qualified beyond "just John"). For female first names we see the exact same pattern with M, for Marie. Marie-Claude, Marie-Camille, Marie-Anne, Marie-Thérèse, etc.
I came here to say the same thing. I think this is the answer. It seems especially common in French, and always because people are named Jean-Christophe etc. I guess this is how it came into North American culture. Do the JC (etc) abbreviations even exist in England?
They exist but are not very common; my guess would be that 'AJ' is the most commonly used. I definitely think Scott's observation still holds despite the lower frequency of people who are known by initials.
I don't think JC would work well; it would remind people of "Jesus Christ".
More likely the Pythonist figure John Cleese.
I'm from the UK and am commonly called JC
I've noticed that with French people, but with the Americans I know, the J's are a whole range of names, not just John.
Maybe the Johns/Jacks started it, and gave a license to all other Js to keep doing it :D
In Spain is mainly because of Jose (Joseph), but Juan (John) is important too.
According to the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 5 of the 10 most common names for men begin with J, and 2 of them are "double first names" with Jose (Jose, Juan, Javier, Jose Antonio y Jose Luis). Double first names with Jose are really common, including Jose Juan or Juan José.
For women, Josefa is the 5th most common name, but it's the only J.
Yeah, my completely uninformed best guess is that there is some good reason for this phenomenon in French (where it seems even more common), and the trend entered English from French cultural influence.
I know two Marie-Claires who go by MC
A French counter example: PY Gerbeau, former executive at what was then called Eurodisney. PY for Pierre-Yves. Perhaps abbreviated to make it easier for Anglophone colleagues to say (it was always "Pee Why" not "Pay Eegrek").
Q: What do John the Baptist & Winnie the Pooh have in common?
A: Their middle name.
Winnie the Pooh's creators: A. A. Milne, E. H. Shepard
One of my clients used to have a JB, JD, JC, JT. and a JG. 2 Johns, 2 Jerry's, and a Jack. It was much more confusing than using their actual names.
I've gone by "JP" for as long as I can remember - my parents certainly made that decision, and by the time I was old enough to be able to change it, it felt weird. Sometimes people call me James and that just feels weird. When our son was born, we knew we wanted to name him after my dad (James) and my wife's dad (David). We also knew we were abbreviating it, so it'd either be DJ or JD. Ultimately we went with DJ for two reasons, both fairly silly: (1) "JD" and "JP" sound too much alike when you're yelling for someone from the other side of the house, and (2) We already had a dog (Rowdy) named after a Scrubs character, and naming our son JD seemed like a little much in that regard.
Generally, I buy the "too many common names so we use abbreviations" argument, but who knows? My parents claimed they wanted the next JP Morgan. Sorry to disappoint Mom and Dad :(
Maybe you are an essayist BECAUSE your initials are SA. (Not entirely joking)
That might also explain all the talk about nominative determinism ...
I mean, certain of his detractors would focus more on his first/last initials.
I hear you, but I'm afraid the Germans of that era ruined "SA" too. (I'll refrain from going into more details.)
And Scott's actual initials are SS. Not any better.
This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
My grandfather had the initials D.O.C. and went by Doc as a nickname despite having attended no college (more common in the 40’s). Relatedly, JD is not what we think of for lawyer, we think lawyer or law degree or less commonly solicitor or Esquire, whereas doctor is more synonymous with MD to the point that we have jokes about dentists and physical therapists and such not being doctors despite being medical practitioners. Similarly, the AMA seems to do a lot here to encourage that stigma with things like physician assistants and nurse practitioners having special and crappy rules and still reporting to a doctor.
Other thought, if you have three Johns in a class, John Stanley Roberts, Jonathan David Allen and Jonathan Henry Randolph, you get a solution set of John, JD and Jonathan. Add one more and you can make him a Jack. Here, you can solve for the people that fit the existing paradigm with pretty good precision. As a William, I go by Will, lots of people go by Bill and a few weirdos go by strangely unrelated things, but it’s generally a choice. Mostly people pick the nickname they want rather than letting the surrounding community decide, so usually the JD or whatever is picked by the parents or the person in question, not the class/teacher/workplace/etc.
Yeah, this might be part of it as well. My classes had two Nathans, so one ended up Nathan and the other Nate.
The problem with JN, JL and JS is pronouncing those letters all start with a vowel (en, el, es) versus T and D which start with a consonant. It's awkward after J.
I had never even considered going by JL Lastname until this thread, and I agree with you that it just seems off. Jacob is already a nice two syllable satisfying name where both syllables start with a hard consonant, whereas JL just sounds like Jail; the two syllables flow together
I think there's something to this. The J* ones that sound good to my ear match that pattern well.
Good:
JB, JC, JD, JJ, JK, JP, JT, JV, JZ
Medium:
JG, JQ, JR, JX
Bad:
JA, JE, JF, JH, JI, JL, JM, JN, JO, JS, JU, JW, JY,
On the other hand I think *J works more often but I'm not so clear on what the pattern is:
Good:
AJ, BJ, CJ, DJ,IJ,KJ, MJ, OJ, PJ, RJ, TJ, VJ,XJ,ZJ
Medium:
NJ, YJ
Bad:
EJ,FJ,GJ,HJ,LJ,QJ,SJ,UJ, WJ
I think sonority has something to do with it; the majority of your "good" list, if you spell them out phonetically, are two syllables and each syllable starts with a consonant, e.g. "Jay Bee", whereas the second syllable starting with a vowel is (to me, maybe I'm crazy) less sonorous, and almost unpleasant to say, e.g. "Jay Aich."
JB and KG are both great.
Is this a reference to the greatest rock duo ever?
The tastiest of jams.
I had a friend in college who went by EJ.
Good analysis. Sounds good, friendly. Good to distinguish between father and son with the same name.
For what it's worth, I had a classmate who went by JL his whole life.
Our son is Joseph Connor Lastname. We named him with full intention of only calling him Connor. Therefore, he often identifies himself as J. Connor Lastname on formal or semi-formal communications.
GrandDad was Joseph. Dad is Joseph. I didn't want to have another Goes-By-First-Name-Joe in the family and husband felt very strongly about naming our son after his dad because they had such a close relationship. We reached this compromise. Did consider Joseph John (after my dad) to be called J.J. No idea why certain J-initial nicknaming is so common but it does roll off tongue.
My dad's family has what I think is a really good work-around to avoid the issue of first name collisions but also maintain that sort of continuity. The father's first name is made the eldest son's middle name rather than his first name. Same for the eldest daughter, but with her mom's name. Subsequent kids often get middle names pulled from other relatives. The name chain goes a fair ways back, too.
It's a tough life using a first initial before the name. Forms don't a.llow for this. My husband was D. Logan Last Name
I ran into this with Social Security - their (computer, of course) system cannot handle the use of, e.g. E. Power Biggs. I wound up having my name legally changed.
My data points - know a "CB", "MB", and yes, "DJ".
Here's a question. Why do you name a child with the full intention of calling him or her by the middle name? Why not make the preferred name first?
That's an excellent question, and I definitely wanted to name him Connor Joseph. I'd fallen in love with the name Connor many years ago, long before it was common in America, and husband really liked that name too. Unfortunately he lost his father to cancer the year before our son was born and it became important to him to name our son after his dad as his first name. It was an uneasy compromise.
Ironically, we thought that an added benefit would be that his mother would be touched that we had honored his dad this way---instead she was really horrible and nasty about the fact that we hadn't given him the full name of her husband/son, "Joseph Michael." It literally ruined my husband's first days with his newborn after his mother yelled at him on the phone that he "didn't love his father" by giving our son that name.
Lesson learned: we will have nothing but good things to say about any name that our kids may give their own kids. Hopefully it won't be anything TOO weird, lol.
Lean heavily toward the "linguistically satisfying" explanation.
Take "H". "H" is a fairly unpleasant letter to pronounce in English. It starts awkwardly, stops flow, and doesn't connect nicely into most other letters. You almost never see people go by initials with "H" in them. Imagine someone that wanted to go by "AH", or "HC". To me, that's so awkward to say, I think people would naturally start referring to them by another name.
Ah, the first specific hypothesis I've seen in this thread about prevalence of any letter other than J - and it sounds totally right to me!
There was an H.H. Holmes, but he was a serial killer so perhaps his aesthetics were not those of the mainstream...
I know someone whose first name starts with an H and who initializes it when writing her name formally because she goes by her second name (her first name is her mom's name). Verbally she obviously just uses that second name, which ironically actually starts with 'C'.
C. S. Lewis hated his first name (Clive) so went by C. S. when writing his name. But his friends and family all called him "Jack".
Like George HW Bush?
No one called him that because it sounded good; it was only because of the need to distinguish him from the other George Bush.
Yes. He was always known just as "George Bush," never with the initials, until his son George W. became prominent. I checked that on Google Ngrams once.
My grandfather, whom I knew into my 20s, went by "HV", and no one alive knows what his initials stood for. It's on his tombstone.
I'm assuming you're not a time traveler from the future and we're talking about different people, which makes this even weirder, but a friend from high school went by HV, starting in elementary school, and he kept the real name a secret. Whoever knew him when he was 5 knew what it was, but they backed him up and didn't tell. I suppose by the time we're in our 80s, there won't be many left who actually know his name at all.
> a friend from high school went by HV, starting in elementary school, and he kept the real name a secret.
My mother once delivered twins which the mother named Huggly and Wuggly. That's what's on their birth certificates now.
My mother remarked that if Wuggly grew up to be an executive, he'd be identified as "W. Lastname" in all contexts.
Maybe grandad's reincarnation.
H. R. McMaster
I don't think going by an initial with H is so uncommon? Off the top of my head:
HP Lovecraft
HL Mencken
HR Giger
HR Haldeman
And the aptly-named JDK downthread also added
HG Wells
DH Lawrence
WH Auden
I also knew someone in high school who went by "H" or sometimes "H middlename lastname". I found his LinkedIn and it looks like he still does!
As a professional name, sure, but unless they were actually called "HP", "HL", etc. in day to day life, it doesn't count. I think that is quite rare.
What about HR, as in H.R. Pufnstuf. Sounds nice to me. As does HP.
You might like HP because it's a common brand name.
H. Rap Brown would probably get very angry.
I'm a JP. I used to go by John Patrick (for a funny story reasons), and it was shorted by classmates when I was in early middle school. My guess is some subset of initials start to "sound like names", and then from there it becomes easier to adopt the name, leading to it becoming more common, leading to them sounding more like names, etc.
This is anecdotal, but I know several people who are "juniors" who then have their names shorted to "X initial" plus "J". For example, Theodore Junior choosing to go by "TJ" instead. I wonder if some of the initial letter shortened combinations that end in J started out as a shortening and way to avoid being called "Junior" and it entered common enough usage to be fashionable. This doesn't explain when "J" is used as the first initial though.
JD and JT are made with the front of the mouth, making them easy to say. They also have a sonorous "E" at the end, making them easy to hear. JP is pretty common too. And of course there's Jay Z. If I'd expect anyone to strategically choose their name to be easy to say and hear, it's him. Maybe the only reason JZ isn't more common is because Z isn't a common letter.
With JN, JL, and JS, you have to make a back-of-the-throad glottal stop to form the "eh" sound. Same problem with MD. And "eh" is not a very sonorous sound. I have a one-syllable short version of my first name with an "eh" vowel, and tried going by the long version for a while because I didn't like how the short version of my name sounded. It was hard for people to hear in loud environments, and sounded "small." But I had to do so much work to enforce the long version of my name that I eventually abandoned my efforts.
I think that after many years of telling people your name over and over again, many people become quite sensitized to the details of the way it sounds and is perceived by others.
I'm JV and don't like it initialised with my surname (though strictly it is JVV so maybe that is a factor, weird to only use my first middle name) and am now trying to figure out why!
Don't like being on the Culver junior varsity team?
You've got an extraneous bracket ending your third to last paragraph.
"J" is just the best letter for names jenerally
My list of predictions, before I read further:
- often done when someone has the same name as a parent
- more common for men than for women
- not done when the second initial is a vowel
- especially common when either initial is J
- most common with letters that are pronounced consonant-vowel (so "bee" or "kay" more than "ess" or "arr")
I wonder if J-names are specifically not merely common, but cross-generationally common, such that John is more likely to be the son of a John (and thus inclined to initialize) than Michael is to be the son of a Michael? I note that Joseph is traditionally an overwhelmingly popular middle name for Catholic boys -- but, on the other hand, Mary is even more so for Catholic girls.
Overall, I don't feel like I have a compelling explanation here, especially for the fact that initialisms are more common with J in *either* position -- J for Junior doesn't explain JD.
C. S. Lewis, e e cummings, A. B. Yehoshua (well, he's not American so rules may not apply here)
Did these people introduce themselves by their initials when meeting people in real life? Otherwise they don’t count.
No idea. About the last one, never heard him being referred to as anything but A.B., but I don't know how he is in his personal life...
C.S. Lewis was Jack to his friends (I don't remember why).
He picked his dog’s name at a young age, just like Indiana Jones (they were also born the same year).
C. S. is Clive Staples, and his distaste for the name can be seen even in Narnia: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
Not "American"? The first one isn't either.
"...JD should be weird because it sounds like a lawyer!"
I my youth -- which was before your youth for most values of "your" -- JD in common parlance meant "juvenile delinquent."
*In
I had a friend in college who went by KP, actually
Also know a KP
My wife Kirsten makes a third KP
K does sound a lot like J. And the two of them don't sound like any other letter, 'cept A.
Kevin Durant in the NBA is often just called KD.
KD and KK are both initials as names that are regularly used in India, while J names are not(at least, I don't know any)
South African-born English cricketer Kevin Pietersen often goes by KP.
I've known a KR and a KP, too. Definitely seems like "K" is somewhat more likely to be initialized than most other non-J letters.
My neurophys professor went by his first two initials, M.D., where his earned doctorate was a PhD. It did look somewhat impressive to me as a student.
One kind-of answer:
My father is John P., and I'm John R., and naming your children after yourself leads to confusion. Further, "John" was an extremely common name as I was growing up, so I was often JR. I attempt with limited success to have my middle initial on any written item. For things that use initials, I am always JRM rather than JM (and used JRM as my nom de net for a long time.)
I am very seldom referred to as JR now.
My guess is that the JD's JR's and AJ's started and people just kind of stuck with them. J does seem a little more mellifluous though that may just be usage talking.
> and naming your children after yourself leads to confusion.
Tell it to George Foreman.
I tend to go by JT and your first supposition was the correct. It was merely a differentiator because there tended to be 2-3 other "Justin"s in my age groups. As to why the specific lettering, I'm not sure. I'm curious if there's a harmony in choice of middle name. (Tyler, if curious)
Aural aesthetics. It's not dissimilar to why people like certain chord progressions in music over others.
I work with someone who goes by "SF".
Work: AJ, BJ, CJ, DJ, EJ, MJ, OJ, PJ, RJ, TJ, VJ,
Don't work: FJ, GJ, HJ, IJ, LJ, QJ, SJ, UJ, WJ, XJ, YJ, ZJ
Kind of work, maybe: KJ, NJ
I'd think twice about BJ. At least until getting out of middle school, I suppose.
Work: JB, JC, JD, JM, JP, JR, JT, JW, JZ
Don't work: JA, JE, JF, JG, JH, JI, JL, JO, JU, JX, JY
??: JK, JN, JQ, JS, JV
In the more NBA names category, Kevin Johnson was often called KJ.
> Don't work: WJ
Well, obviously. W is much harder to say than anything that starts with the sound /w/.
We need to bring back the traditional name, wynn.
JJ
My first and middle names are Carl Jacob, but I go by Jacob in almost every setting (my parents made that decision when I was born). For a while in elementary school I tried to make CJ a thing but it never caught on. Now with nieces, nephews, and goddaughters, JJ has become more common.
One reason I prefer JJ (and preferred CJ for a while) is that I have a speech impediment and it's not unusual for me to say "Jacob" and people hear "chicken" or something else entirely different. I find that I prefer JJ or even Carl because I can pronounce those clearly enough to avoid that awkwardness. That probably doesn't answer why J names in particular get initialed though.
In Catholic circles "John Paul" is a common first name in recent decades, so I know many JPs
My bad guess is that Johns, Jameses, Jacks, and Jefferies are more likely to be from WASPy, vaguely patriarchal families (or to have inherited their naming conventions from them) where parents are likely to name kids after their fathers. If your dad is John and you are John you can't be John, so they have to call you something else. If your dad is John Todd, and your grandad is John Todd and you are John Todd, III your options are "JT" or "Trey."
Spot on for me. I’m the third and my son is the fourth James in a row. But nobody in the family uses initials. JB doesn’t sound right to me. Instead we all use nicknames, and there are plenty to go around for ‘James’.
I've also heard Trey and Tripp as nicknames for III
I think there is something linguistically satisfying about sounds like JD, CJ, etc. beyond their prevalence as initials. I actually knew a guy in my teens who went by CJ. He was black, and had a very white-scanning name which I got the impression he didn't identify much with, but notably, his real initials weren't actually C and J. His first and middle names were Carrington Harris, so apparently he decided "CJ" sounded like a decent initialism, while "CH" wasn't acceptable even if those were his real initials.
I am really the first to mention Jay-Z?
I haven't seen MC Hammer yet either.
I did - first concert I ever went to. Opening acts were Vanilla Ice and En Vogue. For a lame 12 year old, that was the coolest experience of my life so far. Happily I have since had cooler ones. I think.
MC is a title. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_ceremonies#Hip_hop
I think DJ Shadow fits the pattern.
Gee, do people not know any more what the MC and DJ in those early rap names stood for? I feel old...
You aren’t old you are an OG.
It was a revelation when I was in New York taking the subway around Christmas last year, noticed for the first time ever the sign where the J and Z lines run concurrent, chuckled audibly, and my wife looks over and says something to the effect of "yeah dumbass, that's what he's named for," which somehow I never knew.
I definitely noticed that "J" is disproportionately common. But I feel like I've known as many DJ's as JD's, and MJ's, TJ's, JT's, CJ's, etc. I haven't figured out if the non-J letter is disproportionate to the commonness of that letter as an initial, but J clearly is.
I've encountered people from India who use initials as their name where it's not J - an uncle of mine goes by TK, and the interim provost of my university goes by NK (I don't know if "K" is particularly common for Indian names or just a coincidence of these two).
I recall two people who either go by their initials or got nicknamed that way, and they're both JD.
This seems like one of these weird UNSONG reality quirks.
I was going to comment "This could be an omake for UNSONG" and then stopped to search comments in case someone already mentioned it
I'm thinking about this in terms of mouth movement. In some languages (say, Korean) there's a lot of variable sounds that a letter might make, and the rule governing them comes down to something like "Korean is a lazy-mouthed language, and it's easier to make a B sound after this particular vowel sound than it is a P sound".
J seems unique to me in that "Jay" flows really easily from a lot of other sounds. so "beejay", "ceejay" and "deejay" are all relatively easy to say. Emmjay is harder, and you see it less. Aychjay is kind of hard to say, and you see it never; doubleyoujay is a lot of trouble and nobody uses it at all. Meanwhile the only thing saving us from Zeejay is that it's a little bit too futuristic-in-the-1980's sounding and there aren't that many Zachs.
Doubleyou is such a mouthful. People had to call him George "Dubya" Bush just to spare their jaws the trouble.
I've known people who go by abbreviations without J. Including: a PC and an MD. I didn't know a KP but it was used as a nickname for a kid's show. I didn't know a DA or LA. WB was a good friend of mine and I used to call him WB (William Beverley Surname).
I think what caused it was there was a LOT of name overlap. I was once in a twenty person class where six people had the same first name as I did. This led to a lot of nicknaming to fill in the gaps. Some of it was traits or nicknames and some of it was using a unique element of the name. But yeah, it was kind of like a medieval village now that I think about it.
I wonder how much of this is people in smaller communities having more intense contact with more culturally similar people requiring more distinction through things like nicknames?
As a JP -- my parents called me that as a nickname growing up -- my belief is that it's mostly a cultural thing. I.e. there have been historical precedents that stuck (i.e. JP Morgan) and also this pattern is satisfying for the "meme brain" which may be for the reason you mention -- J is just a melodious/satisfying letter; other names have different nicknames. Also, I must invoke John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt here. But I wouldn't be surprised if there's a deeper story in our cultural history with more gravity involved somewhere. Now that I'm an adult, I just go by Jeremy. I go by Meyer (my last name) if there are multiple Jeremys. If I ever become a wealthy banker, I'll probably go by JP Meyer.
I was called JD to distinguish me from 5 other Johns in the family. In 4th grade the nuns refused to allow JD, insisting on John because of its Christian name status. Since then, both names apply depending on who is addressing me, as a JD commented earlier. At one workplace, for about 4 years, it was JL.
I never thought I would be the subject of an ACX post. That's how you know you've made it, huh.
I was once in an eleven person Spanish class that included JT, TJ, KJ, RK, and Jay. That was a time.
I went to J C Booth Middle School. I have completely forgotten who J C Booth was.
Let me guess - the full name was "J C Booth Memorial Middle School".
Whenever somebody puts "memorial" in a name, everyone immediately forgets whatever it was they were memorializing.
Then, I'm always tempted when somebody tells me they attended "Chicago Memorial High School" to ask "oh no....what happened to Chicago?".
No, no "Memorial" in the name. But probably a dead guy.
DA? Except DA Pennebaker, I guess.
Before college, the only instance of this I knew was a guy named DJ. I’ve since met a CJ and an MJ. But I’ve also encountered a few people who go by triple initials—AOK and DMZ. I think the triple initials case has more to do with it also being their student username, plus some name collision, plus having the initials colliding with a real word.
>but then JD should be weird because it sounds like a lawyer!
Maybe it's just me, but never in my life have I heard a lawyer referred to as "a JD"
Maybe part of it is linguistic. We do say PC etc but a y ending (ass in "Jay") feels "easier" to roll into another letter. PC for example seems more like two distinct and short bursts.
Fellow J here,
my take: JD, JC etc sound good. it just sounds cooler saying JD vs. John Dough. As well, theres something phonetically appealing about pairing lettings that end with certain sounds. Micheal becomes "Mikey", that familar sounding "y" at the end of something, and "Jay-Dee" just rolls off the tounge. As opposed to "Pee-Dee" or "Rrrr-Dee". I think it gets at something: theres no way to turn the name "Jason" to "jaycey" or any thing like you can with "Mike", "John" or Dave". so you just leverage the good sounding letter and use their initials. Even JR in Dallas had it!
You made us stop to think about the pattern. My guess was: nice vowels, rather after the consonant, that also work together well (the examples I thought of had different vowels with the first and the second initial, but I guess it might be the same if it sounds nice). For example TK would work well.
In practice, I can think of only one person who does this. The example fits the vowels theory and it fits the J. - theory. And somehow in this case it also sounds incredibly arrogant. ;)
The only people I know who go by initials are trans/non-binary and use their initials from their "deadnames" as their new names. This doesn't follow a pattern based on the actual lettering of the names, rather a cultural pattern.
Just to add data: when you asked me to sit and think for a bit I did, and I independently also concluded that the only people I know of that use initials as their name start with J. I have an uncle that everyone calls JB, but in his case I know it's because he's Jesse Bernard (lastname) the 5th, and when you have that many Jesse Bernards I guess it's reasonable to go by JB. I've never met anyone else with a legacy name so beats me if initializing it is a common thing.
Come to think of it, is there some connection to calling people "Junior?" Which is just spelled Jr? Does that somehow prime the English language for two letter J names?
Probably not.
My parents tried to get me to go by JD when I was little, thinking that I would like it, and it'd be cool, etc. The non-melodious sound bothered me intensely and i insisted they call me by my birth name around when I started preschool.
My theory is that it's the 'aye' sound that does it. 'K' is also fairly common in these sorts of initializations.
I think the melodious hypothesis matters. JN, JL, JS- all have one letter where the pronunciation begins with a vowel (en, ell, ess). JD, JT, JC- do not.
I noticed this too.
Begin with consonant: JB, JC, JD, JG, JJ, JK, JP, JQ, JT, JV, JW, JY, and JZ
Begin with vowel: JA, JE, JF, JH, JI, JL, JM, JN, JO, JR, JS, JU, JX
Among those on the bottom list, only JRR Tolkein strikes me as "common" (but it's only one guy)
I think the bit about Jay being a name is on to something. Notably the cases that don't seem to follow this pattern are more feminine names.
I've always had a strong association between nicknames like JT/JD and a certain kind of very rough and unsophisticated machoness. I mean, I have relatives with these names/initials and it feels like the kind of thing I'd call them if we are working on some construction or farm project together (they raised a few animals on side) but would be much less likely to do so when interacting with the very same ppl in an academic or religious setting. There is a weird way it feels a bit like the encouraging non-homosexual male butt slap. Like you'd never do that to those ppl if you are congratulating them for smashing a group theory exam. Nowhere near as extreme as that but same idea.
As an actual professional group theorist, I can attest I've never seen a butt slap as a congratulations for any of my students. But who knows what happens after they leave the classroom?
My name is John David Brothers. I think of myself as John, but I typically write 'jb' at the close of my emails and a lot of people at work refer to me as jb. My wife often calls me Jay, and when I've outraged her, John David! Every once in a while she calls me JD.
Could it be simply a matter of mouth movement required? JD requires a very minimal amount of mouth movement, just mostly some minimal tongue movement behind the teeth. But when an initial ends with an eee sound, there's movement required to return to the J sound . So DJ is a little more effort than JD. CJ is similar to DJ, except that the S sound involves more breath and takes a little longer to enunciate.
Perhaps that's the simplest explanation - JD is easy to enunciate with minimal effort, and the only possible misinterpretations are JB and JT.
I lean heavily towards the satisfaction hypothesis, and particularly satisfying vowels; English speakers tend to agree on vowel order that sounds satisfying. Cf. bad big wolf, clop clip, dong ding. I'm less certain about 'ee' sounds, but 'i' sure as hell comes before 'a' or 'o' in phrases.
AFAIK the common trope is that only serial killers or other kinds of deranged assassins have three full names, e.g. "Lee Harvey Oswald". Shortening one's name to just the first and middle initial might be a way to bypass that association.
Sirhan Sirhan.
His initials wouldn't work any better...
There's also James Fenimore Cooper.
Cooper, Mason, Hunter, Tanner... lots of low-prestige trades that somehow became names of affluent children.
Thoughts of a JD [K], JD [an attorney]:
Growing up I was known by full first two names: J--- D---- and the initials.
I am even Uncle JD or Uncle J--- D---- to a dozen.
The use of both names and/or initials was to distinguish me from father, a JA and to clarify I was not a junior. I had a cousin (technically a second cuz a lot of 1st cuz and 2nd cuz are overlap) 3 years older who was a JT but also went by full J--- T-----, but also to distinguish him from his father who was a JJ. Him being a JT certainly made me being JD seem natural.
I view the initialization as less initialization than a "diminutive" form of two full names.
I've heard initials were used by working class to separate them from hoity toity upper class. Lower class not entitled to full names. (Or didn't know how to write? full name?) But I think this stigma flipped.
I think initials can also hide ethnicity.
So, to summarize:
Distinguish from relative or someone
Diminutive
Working class
Ethnicity hiding device
Agree with "stigma flipped," if I follow what you're saying. I see the initials as a marker of higher status, maybe even overrepresented in WASP culture. If we assume more J names in that culture to start with, that might be the confounding factor that drives both.
Separate thing is that initials would be blocked where the combination is rude (BJ is pointed out elsewhere in comments, and you also don't see a lot of BMs PPs etc.). Maybe there aren't a ton of rude J words.
As a phonologist, I don't intuitively think the phonological explanations are all that persuasive here, since I haven't seen a parsimonious rule proposed.
Up until 19th century few British had middle names. It was an upper class thing adopted from Italians (and French) where middle name was reference to saint.
See also "https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/fashion/theyre-dropping-like-middle-initials.html"
As for your question at the end: I like my name, and I would never ever shorten it in face-to-face interactions.
Regarding J.D. being associated with lawyers...
Although it's not as commonly used these days because it can seem pretentious, practicing lawyers have traditionally identified themselves with the abbreviation "Esq." (for "Esquire") rather than referring to their degree.
J.D. rabbit hole: The J.D. is itself a relatively new degree in the U.S. It was initially created in the early 1900s, and really only cemented itself as the replacement for the LL.B. (Bachelor of Laws) in the late 1960s. Unlike other common-law countries where legal education takes place at the college-level, specialized legal education in the U.S. takes place after college so awarding a second bachelor's degree could mistakenly imply lower-level work. (Stephen Breyer, who will retire at the end of this term, is the last U.S. Supreme Court Justice to have received an LL.B. rather than a J.D.)
Could just be due to the popularity of Scrubs?
I knew a JD in college before Scrubs came out.
I knew someone named James David Smith, everyone called him JDS. When someone once referred to him as James Smith, we went "who?"
> Some people at the meetup thought those combinations sounded less melodious than “JD”, but I’m not really feeling it.
I am absolutely feeling it. JD rolls off the tongue, JN, JL, and JS sound awkward. Probably it's the "eh" sound. "jay-ehn", "jay-ehl", "jay-ehs" have a vowel after "ay", which is weird for English phonetics.
Also, "jay-ass" is probably somehow a racial slur.
This sounds very much like a conversation I would get into after the edibles kicked in.
M. C. Escher
J and K are the only letters whose pronunciation starts with a consonant and ends in an "ay" sound. Most combinations of *ay with *ee sounds harmonious and nominative to English speakers, eg JP, KD, CK, TJ, etc. Pure combinations of "*ee" can sound okay, but it's more hit or miss, and doesn't usually connote a name eg GP, CT, TV, etc.
J names are more common than K names, so most of the people with an option on pleasant sounding initialisms involve J's.
> (in my case, it’s because my initials are SA and I’m an essayist - it would just be weird!)
This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Ease of pronunciation is probably right, but there are some non-J combos that roll off the tongue, including baseball's CC Sabathia, and two singers, KD Lang and KT Osborn (though I don't know if either of the singers actually go by those initials in everyday life). And it's fictional, but the A-team's BA Backus works. One that jumps to mind that definitely doesn't sound good at all is Y.A. Tittle the former Giants quarterback. (Again, I don't know if people actually called him YA, but that definitely takes your mouth in two different directions, which is inefficient.) Of course his given name was Yelberton Abraham Tittle (no joke) so maybe it was still an improvement
I laughed out loud at the idea that JD Salinger might have started it.
Why not
CS Lewis,
J.R.R. Tolkien
W.E.B. Du Bois
E.B. White
H.G. Wells
D.H. Lawrence
G.K. Chesterton
W.H. Auden
P.G. Wodehouse
H.L. Mencken
P.D. James
A.A. Milne
W.B. Yeats
The very first paragraph said "Authors who use their initials on their books (eg J.K. Rowling) don’t count, unless they also go by their initials in everyday life." I'm pretty sure most of those people didn't go round addressing each other in conversation as "J.R.R" and "W.E.B" and so on.
He specifically mentioned "JD Salinger"! as a postulated reason for popularity.
Which is patently ridiculous. For people over 70 in US, JD Crowe Heisman winner 1957 was way more famous than JD Salinger.
The problem here is with looking for a "special" reason for "random" variation. See W E Deming (and W A Shewhart).
Assuming that J is most popular initial is not likely due to a special cause ( famous person or sound), rather it is because John, James, Jospeh, Jose, Juan, Jerome, Jacques, etc make make it more likely to be common.
That is an interesting thought. As a sort of empirical check, I took a look at the 100 most popular boys names for births in the 1990s, which probably corresponds to Scott's demographic, if I remember his approximate age correctly. We find the following very uneven distribution of initial letters:
J: 22%
A: 11%
C: 9%
M: 8%
D: 7%
T: 6%
B: 6%
S: 5%
... remaining letters below 5%....
In short, an initial letter of "J" is by far the most common among men of the generation born in the 90s, the runner up ("A") being only half as common.
That all by itself would seem sufficient to explain an excess of people going by their initials having the first initial be "J". At least, one would naturally expect, if the probability of going by your initials has zero correlation to what those initials are, you would still observe initials beginning with "J" twice as often as any other letter, and at least four times as often as most letters.
I've seen MC (hammer), MJ, EM, and CS
I think it tends to sound better if the pronunciation of the last letter ends with a vowel. This is also why French-source words in English tend to sound better than the Germanic-source ones.
Almost everything in French ends in a vowel sound. Even if it's not spelled that way, they drop the final consonant to make it sound that way. German will end a word with five consonants in a row like "Dietzsch"
I went by J Ray in AP chemistry and tech startupry and I liked that. I never asked people to call me that elsewhere but maybe I should. John is annoyingly common and in spite of how common it is people often mishear it as Don. Having more than one bit of phonetic distance from other common words is good.
"MC" in "MC Hammer" does not abbreviate a name but rather the occupational title "Master of Ceremonies". Wikipedia lists several other Hip-Hop-related MCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_ceremonies#Hip_hop
I go by PJ because it keeps people from calling me "Phil". (For some reason people think they're being friendly when they do that.)
JD here. I started going by JD when I was working on a team with 3 Jeff's, which was just too confusing. My best friend in high school had called me JD once in a while, and I had another colleague who had JP on his business card, so I figured JD could be my official business name.
Funnily enough, I had a friend in middle school whom we all called KP. He was the only Kevin in the grade so it wasn't a differentiator, just a cool sounding nickname.
Are you old enough to know KP meant kitchen patrol?
Nope!
I remember this from Boy Scouts. I assumed it a military thing because almost all the adults in the troop were in the military.
I'm sure there is database. Are full first and middle names distributed any differently than initials.
If all of combinations of first names with J and second names starting with D represent x% of all names how different is that from the % of initialized names that are JD.
My thought is that the prevalence of initialized names is directly related to prevalence of names which could form that initial. My hypothesis would be stated as there is no difference! ie a null hypothesis.
Only if the null hypothesis is rejected would I look for a reason.
I may have misread but SA seems to have presumed a difference and wants to know why.
Taking cue from the late and initialized W.E. Deming: don't search for a special or assignable cause unless there is first a signal that such a search might be fruitful.
vaguely related: why did 95% of late 19th century British philosophers write under such initialized names (FH Bradley, TH Green, GF Stout, CD Broad, JO Urmson, FCS Schiller, GE Moore, etc., etc.)? Seems to have been much less common in the US at the time.
John Stuart Mill signed his name "J. S. Mill" so often (even on love letters) that he unthinkingly did it on his wedding registry, and the register made him squeeze in an additional "ohn" and "tuart".
My initials are LA. I've never referred to myself like that. However, there are a number of old friends, all of whom I met in high school, who spontaneously referred to me as LA when we met, and now still do.
JL doesn't sound good, so there's JLo
'J' is one one of those syllables where you often pronounce the entire letter = 'Jaye', instead of just the 'Juh' consonant sound. In contrast, the letter 'N', evokes the 'nnnn' sound more so than how it is pronounced in isolation = 'ayyn'
Thus, when 'J'-the initial is used as the most common way of addressing a person, it does not strike the average person as odd. It fits right in.
In Scott's case, the 'S' is the weird one because it evokes the 'ssss' sound more than 'ayyys'. 'A' is less worse, but there probably should be special category for vowels all together.
This is quite USA-specific, of course. In Ireland there are lots of JP (John Paul after the pope, as already mentioned), and TJ, DJ, JJ, PJ, MJ. The J could as easily be Jack, James or Joseph as John.
The reason for a double initial is partly the practice which was common of naming a boy after both their father and grandfather. It pretty much doesn't exist for girls.
I suspect it has a lot to do with it feeling weird to use initials that aren't currently popular to use. Ie. my name is Adam Ross Zerner. I would feel weird going by AR because AR isn't a thing that people go by. But if my first name was John, I wouldn't feel weird about going by JR, because JR is a thing that people go by.
That does beg the question of how eg. JR got popular in the first place. I dunno what the answer would be there. It doesn't seem too hard to bootstrap. Other trends related to popularity face the same issue, and they seem to still happen a lot.
As non-English speaker, I first encountered this by watching (dubbed into Slovak) show Step by Step. There was a kid that was called JT. I realized many years later that those were initials and not a proper name. I think it is because J is the only letter that spelled in English sounds like a proper syllable. Together with other letters, it really creates an impression of real word, unlike other combinations (such as MD, where it is obviously not-a-word)
Another supporting argument. Superman’s name is Kal-El. That sounds like a proper name. KL wouldn’t. If English would spell K as Kal instead of Key, it would make a lots of difference in the frequency of usage
My daughter goes by MJ because her first name is 3-syllables and doesn't have any other reasonable shortening of the name.
Anecdotal data point: My mom is a somewhat successful playwright who goes by "CJ" instead of "Cheryl," and this is specifically because she doesn't want readers or audience members to have preconceptions about her gender.
in my case, it’s because my initials are SA and I’m an essayist - it would just be weird!
Score one more for nominative determinism
I am known by my first name, except at work, where the initialism (MJ) is omnipresent, and plenty of people actually forget my name, and are surprised to hear it.
The company has a number of initials-identified people, most prominently the two founders, neither of whom has a J initial. I can't speak for their reasoning, but I arrived, discovered that I was one of six people (out of fewer than two hundred) with my name, and made my initials my slack handle. It's become convenient as a way to immediately know who's a work contact, and who I actually know.
We call our son EJ, because we wanted to name him Eric after me and his grandpa, but not call him Eric / not have him be a junior, although some people think EJ is for Eric Junior (it's not).
A 'CJ' here. I can confirm that my decision to initial myself (under certain conditions) is based purely on the fact that I thought my name would roll better off the tongue that way.
Scott, this entire essay is just an excuse to make the SA/essay joke isn't it.
As an anecdote me and a friend in second grade had the same first name and both had last names starting with D, so he went by JD and I went by my regular first name.
I think there are two completely different things happening here, but both relate to fathers and sons having the same first name.
1. Where the son is whatever Junior, you get wJ to distinguish him from dad. Women don’t generally use junior.
2. I suspect that men with traditional names and men who, as a parent, favor a traditional name for their sons are overlapping sets. So you get a high overlap of men with the names John and Joseph favoring the idea of naming their son the same thing. So you get J whatever. The commonality of both John and Joseph means that there is some utility for people outside the family, to distinguish all the Johns from each other. But it’s a bit of a mystery why that logic doesn’t apply to Michael, which is slightly more common. Perhaps Michael is the second son’s name?
I think there are a more nicknames for Michael than for John. Jack, Jay, Johnny, Jock vs Mike, Mick, Mikey, Mitch, Mickey, Mitt, and even Mischa if appropriate.
Watching people post their own initials and their families’ in these comments gives me an idea for your next post.
“Isn’t it funny how social security numbers always seem to be divisible by 23? Also, your account number and your routing numbers are always coprime! If you have any counterexamples, please share!”
I think patterns that come out consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (like jay-dee or dee-dee) are a lot easier and more fluent and satisfying to say than patterns that come out consonant-vowel=vowel-consontant (like jay-ess or jay-em).
Basically, two vowel sounds in a row are difficult to make distinct from each other and are annoying to say, slow down the flow of language a bit.
Anecdotal to add, but I’ve found these sorts of letter abbreviations to be more common in the working class…though perhaps that’s just them having more kids and running into more legacy naming issues with various repeated letters of grandparents and such? And for one of Scott’s counters, I know a person who goes by DA.
An interesting point from reading other comments. There seems to be no theme or common origin story for these. Some people are picking their own, sometimes it is peers in school, and sometimes it is parental choice. Often it does seem to be doubling up or just shortening names, etc. but I find it interesting that all 3 origins of self, family, and peers occur with some high degree of frequency.
I’ve also noticed no particular pattern other than personality in who is more or less willing to change their name or not. I never really thought to alter my name in a new environment, but I know some folks who don’t really have a consistent name and it doesn’t bother them at all. Many folks have a family pet or formal name, and various nicknames amongst different peer groups.
So that’s another phenomenon…people who do not have a consistent name. Do you all know many folks like that? I.e. my college friends call me this, high school friends that, my family xyz, and my co workers abc? I’ve met many of folks who do this sort of multi name thing.
I’m just here for the Bertram Marcus Stoole jokes.
(In all seriousness, my parents went to college with a man named Basil Owen Sweatt. And he did go by his initials. He became a school administrator.)
This lady's name is all over buildings in Houston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ima_Hogg
The hilarious eco-thriller movie 'Stark' features the character played by author Ben Elton called 'CD'. Free on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz0lngWk8ow
In Finland J-P is quite a common initials nickname, but the J is pronounced YEE.
Do they pronounce the P as we do? So J-P rhymes?
A bit lower, you can try the speaker button here https://translate.google.com/?sl=fi&tl=en&text=jiipee&op=translate
I've been trying to think of other common ones, and a lot of them seem to have P in them, so maybe P is the J of Finnish initials.
FWIW, there are many Indian males with names ending in "-jay", and it's not initials.
Related question I often puzzle over: there is a clear outlier among letters for starting boy’s names (J) and a clear (maybe slightly less clear) outlier for starting girl’s names (M). Why those letters?? J is pretty rare in English otherwise. Why different letters?
M for girls might have to do with Marian devotion. The letter J doesn’t really seem like it would have much connection at all to Jesus specifically.
I think the relatively high number of J names for boys in England comes from the history of widespread Christianity - The popular names James and John (which was the number 1 name for decades!) both originate from the Bible as do other names such as Jacob, Jeremy, Joshua, Joseph (whence Joe) Jedidiah, Jared and more. They were originally names in the Hebrew language that were later Hellenized, Latinized and Anglicized.
Musicality (or melody) in names is very likely an influence in this puzzle (but not the only one!) This is true with company names, product names, and person names. It's easiest to spot in the long vowel sounds, though we are also huge fans on the hard consonants.
In English, the long ē sound is the most common in pronouncing individual letters. 8 letters end with an ē sound (other E itself) are B, C, D, G, P, T, Z). Far behind with only 2 letters is the ā sound (J, K) and ū sound (Q, W). And ī sound is only present in one other letter, Y.
If you look some of the popular name initial combos, they're most often an alternation of only two pairings:
ā + ē (JT, JD, JB or JāTē, JāDē, JāBē)
ē + ā (CJ, TJ or CēJā, TēJā)
We also have biases when choosing boys and girls names at least in the US, current generations. You'll find doubles of the *same* long vowel sounds in girls names or nicknames (Mimi, Coco, Cece, Edie, Kiki, Dee Dee) because historically we have found them cute in a feminine way. This same long vowel pattern seems much more rare in boys names or nicknames.
But these common initial names seem like a parallel masculine cute - JB, JT, JD et al - and often are handed out to boys when they're, well, young boys. It's cute, but boy cute.
Go into individual communities - ethnic, social - and you'll find unique patterns. And as noted, lots of the popularity of these patterns are generational in the U.S. They can be dominant for period and then nearly disappear a few decades later.
I know a ton of people who go by M initials without a J. (MK, MC, even an MB). But these are all Marys, and I am very Catholic, so this might be specific to that context.
I worked with a Mary who had two sisters named Mary - distinguished by their middle names. Catholic, yes.
I had a Mary Beth in the same class as a Maribeth. It was sometimes confusing.
This discussion could benefit from data. Does anyone have access to a db of people's informal names which is at all representative of current U.S. population?
Another interesting pattern is that those names have different stress patterns. For me, I put more stress on the second letter in JD, JR, JT, but more stress on the first letter in CJ, AJ, etc. So the J is always less stressed that the other initial. Do others also pronounce them this way?
Yes that‘s interesting, and nobody else here has noted it as far as I can see. I suspect that indeed the J never gets the emphasis (but I‘m not a native English speaker). My general take would be that it is well-suited as a companion sound because of the effortless-throwaway nature of the vowel part and the smoothness/flair of the consonant part.
Ugly combinations are generally less likely, e.g. the JN, JL, JS mentioned by Scott, where the second letter starts with another vowel part (as others have noted).
EA says above: „JL doesn‘t sound good, so there‘s JLo“. That‘s a „counterexample“ because the J in JLo gets the emphasis (I think). But then the vowel part of „Lo“ has the same effortless-throwaway nature, and perhaps the consonant part is equally smooth, so it makes sense for the emphasis to default on the first letter, as in JJ.
EDIT: contradicting what I just wrote, Jay Kay of Jamiroquai, emphasis on Jay even though Kay is not smooth.
I am trying to decide if nomitive determinism is once again at work, in that if you went by initials you'd be an "SA essayist" or if you used your real name and preferred sub-genre, an "SS apologist". It would go a long way to explaining why bad-faith readings by culture warriors keep coming to such weird conclusions about your "real" political alignment.
I answer as AJ as readily as to my given name, but only my close family, because my grandfather was a racer and was fond of A.J. Foyt. When I was taking a post-secondary class, I had the instructor call me AJ to see if I liked it. It was fine, but not worth pursuing.
One issue is that, for professional work, I didn't like the sound of the initialism with my monosyllabic last name.
"But then how come there are so few JNs, JLs, or JS’s?" JN sounds like Jane, JL sounds like jail, JS sounds like Jess. Pretty obvious why they are not being used not sure if you were joking or not. On another note LT was a famous football player, then another famous football player, and I've now met a guy in real life who is also called LT, possibly in homage. Maybe some of these get popular because of famous person xyz?
I'm a JG. I don't really introduce myself as it but it's a nickname a lot of friends use (as well as my mother and brother). I've got a double-barrelled first name, hyphenated, and it's the initials of those.
I can't say I'd observed the prevalence of J in the past. I'm wracking my brains for examples but I can't think of anyone else I know in real life who goes by their initials, J or otherwise.
I do indeed feel JD over JL, JN or JS. I resent the back to back vowels that either slur together or force me to make an artificial break between them to articulate each individual letter. JD or JT doesn't have this problem, and the final "ee" sound feels friendly. Similarly the final J in CJ or DJ feels friendly. J is just a folksy letter for reasons I can't articulate.
When I'm thinking of names for potential children I might have, I do consider the appeal of the first two initials plus the last name, or the appeal of the middle initial between the first and the last name. I have some family members that I would otherwise like to commemorate by giving my child their first name as a middle name, but will probably decide against for initial-letter euphony (against N's, eg)
My father told me a story about one of his war buddies (supposedly, although it sounds more like a Reader's Digest Humor in Uniform story) named R B Donnelly. The US military couldn't handle single letter names, so his name was officially R(only) B(only) Donnelly, which is how he became known as Ronnelly Bonnelly Donnelly.
Hey, I remember that MASH episode...
Like when you grew up around too many other Orenthals, so you just go by OJ.
There's probably two basic categories of people who use their middle initials -- those whose names are too common like John (J K) Simmons or John (J R R) Tolkein, and those whose names are too embarassing like Orenthal Simpson and Pelham Wodehouse.
Would Tolkien's last name make him stand out enough?
Here's a really cool paper by Michael Ramscar et al. on how information theoretic pressures shape name grammars to ease processing and retrieval, and how state legislation has recently disrupted this in the West (as in, in the last few hundred years): https://cogsci.mindmodeling.org/2013/papers/0578/paper0578.pdf
For me as a linguist, what Ramscar and other likeminded researchers are doing is easily the most fascinating development in current linguistics. As a longer and more comprehensive introduction to this line of thought, I can recommend this working paper which gives an updated take on name grammars and shows the same type of thing happening in other areas of language: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1904/1904.03991.pdf
So knowing that naming practices are finely attuned to the extant distribution of names in a given community, I'm wondering whether something like this is behind the J*/*J thing too? Sort of in the direction of "some people theorized that J names (eg John, Jack, etc) are so common that their holders need to differentiate themselves".
Or maybe it's just that some of these are more entrenched and it's a positive feedback loop, in which case I agree it's intriguing that they seem disproportionately likely to contain a J.
FWIW, the French fairly often give hyphenated first names, and while I haven't checked any statistics, I feel like Jean-* would come out on top. So J strikes again there.
Checking a list of NFL football players that I happened to have, I count 36 who use initials as their first name (including 2 who spell them out).
6 AJ
6 CJ
6 TJ
3 DJ
3 KJ
2 JJ
1 AC
1 DK
1 EJ
1 JD
1 JK
1 JP
1 OJ
1 TY
1 CeeDee
1 DeeJay
That's 5 people with J as the first letter, 29 with J as the second letter (including 1 spelled and 2 named JJ who overlap with the first group), and 4 people without a J (including 1 spelled). Just one JD (McKissic).
(There were also 2 people named "Jay" that I did not include because AFAICT that is their actual given name.)
And here's where those 36 sets of initials came from:
17 first name, middle name
10 first name, junior
4 first name, within first name
2 middle name, junior
1 first name, last name
1 father’s first name, within father’s first name
1 ambiguous (first-middle or first-junior)
I assume this is *CURRENT* NFL players, not historic, otherwise all those numbers are way too low.
It's a list of about 1140 QBs, RBs, WRs, and TEs from the past decade or so.
Anyone who wants to do something more comprehensive, or look at changes over time, could scrape the names from Pro Football Reference.
https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/
I have a friend from Nashville who named his son something which could be abbreviated 'DJ' which pleased him because, as he said, "That's close to JD which in Nashville is a holy abbreviation because of Jack Daniels." My personal stereotype of people who go by JD/CJ/whatever is of good-old-boy southern types, so maybe good ol Jack Daniels is the root of it all?
And for what it's worth, I have a female friend whose initials are KP and that's generally what she goes by in our friend group.
Your "1% anything else"-assumption may hold true for 2022 America.
But instead of relying on your flawed intuitions on the matter, you should check a more scholarly source on the historical context. I refer to the venerable & all devouring Pop-Culture wiki, of course.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyKnownByInitials
Under "Real Life - Other Famous Individuals" (as opposed to "Real Life - Writers" which seem to follow their own conventions) it actually has 55% percent people "Only Known by Initials", who do not have a "J" in their initials. Specifiaclly I counted 21 out of 40 examples given.
If I include the second entry with the "sportsmen", the "J"-camp gets bolstered by 7 more AJs.
In the discussion page on this article, Alvin sagely asks "Why so many A.J.s?".
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/remarks.php?trope=Main.OnlyKnownByInitials
Why indeed? Perhaps it's best to ignore them as outliers and ballplayers.
However, if we do not, that still leaves the non-J fraction with a considerable 44% representation. Far greater than your estimated 1%.
They do not sub-categorize between extant and extinct initial holders. With a bit of research this could easily be done, however it's unclear if this list would be representative for the general population.
The non-J fraction includes specifically:
Brigitte Bardot: If you said B.B. in the Fifties and Sixties everyone knew you were referring to her.
C. C. H. (Carol Christine Hilaria) Pounder, actress
CC (Carsten Charles) Sabathia (Jr.) - retired pitcher for several MLB teams, most notably the New York Yankees. Unlike most examples of this trope, he chooses not to use periods.
D. B. (Daniel Bernard) Sweeney, actor
D. L. (Darryl Lynn) Hughley, actor, comedian and political commentator
D. W. (David Wark) Griffith
G. W. (George William) Bailey, actor
K. C. (Kristina Cassandra) Concepcion, a Filipino actress.
Subverted with late professional basketball player and coach K. C. Jones. "K.C." is his real name.
Louis C.K., born Louis Székely (pronounced "SEE-kay").
L. (Lafayette) Ron Hubbard, creator of Scientology
Inverted with actress Maggie Q. "Q" stands for "Quigley".
M. Night Shyamalan - real name Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan; the "Night" was substituted for his middle name just to sound cool.
P. K. (Pernell-Karl Sylvester) Subban, defenseman for the NHL's New Jersey Devils (and previously the Nashville Predators and Montreal Canadiens), who happens to share his initials with an ice hockey special team (penalty kill) to the amusement of color commentators.
P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum, founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus
P. Z. (Paul Zachary) Myers
S. E. (Sarah Elizabeth) Cupp, political commentator
T. K. (Thomas Kent) Carter, actor
W. C. Fields - real name William Claude Dukenfield, American comedian and actor
W.C. (William Christopher) Handy, Father of the Blues.
W.E.B. (William Edward Burghart) DuBois, sociologist and co-founder of the NAACP.
Arguably this list is also missing "Marshall Bruce Mathers III" who also goes by Eminem or M&M. Though perhaps they did not think it appropriate to count a Rap God as an "Other Famous Indiviual", given that divinity transcends mere mortal fame.
I shall abide by TV-Tropes' scholarly authority in this Marshall matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbGs_qK2PQA
Seems like entertainers raise the same issue that Scott brought up about writers in the first paragraph of the OP: how many of them actually go by their initials in everyday life? It seems to me that people with public names often style them to be distinctive, which by definition makes them unrepresentative of the general public.
This is a good point.
TV Tropes doesn't exclusively list "entertainers" as such.
Though (or people with brand-awareness) might be overreprsented in it?
Then again, such attributes (being an enertertainer, being brand-aware) do tend to help make you famous in the first place.
Though the explanation for going by initials in general, is wanting to be distinctive, anyway. Why would only J-people want to do this?
However, I still think that Scott might be vastly underestimating the 1%-non-J-initials group. Perhaps J-initials are overrepresented or his experience is non-representative.
Doctors would want to go by initials, because they're short on time and their cultural mileu is influenced by Scrub's JD.
J.D. could also of course stand for "Junior Doctor", so we get a normative determinism-angle.
Personally I think the theory in the Reddit-thread is just wrong:
"Hey Reddit, why are some sets of initials commonly used as names, like "JD" and "CJ," but you never hear of initial sets outside of that very common group of names?"
Or not sufficiently quantified to be... all that right. Obviously it's not "never" for the non-Js. This is somewhat finnicky to figure out, as you can't just check a phonebook for this?
Personally, I don't know a single person that goes by their initials, as this is not done in Germany or German-speaking countries to my knowledge.
Is this a purely Anglo-thing?
Huh, I'm going to say the Jay sounds nice. Kay sounds the same. I've known an MK and KP.
I go by just my first name, by initials I'm a 'JP' but not a 'John Paul.' I think most JPs are John Paul, right? Are other initialized names bounded mostly to just one set of first/middle like that?
My grandfather had a middle initial, but not a middle name. It was J.
Harry S. Truman had no middle name. And there was a George Carver who became George W. Carver, and then George Washington Carver.
The S in Ulysses S. Grant also didn’t stand for anything
Like Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose.
Also, Homer J. Simpson until season 10 when his actual middle name was revealed to be Jay.
I knew a girl named Mary Alice who went by MA. It seemed like a great nickname until she changed it up to MAlice, which was even better!
My mother was responsible for my T.J. She was an Irish immigrant to USA in 1939, She married my dad in 1943 and they took turns naming Irish Catholic boys over the next eight years. It was his turn when i arrived in 1951, but she disliked the choices. I was named for my Uncle Tom Elliott, a D Day infantryman who became a NYC cop. But my mother being Irish associated 'Tom' with a young turkey and Tommy was a British soldier -- anathema to someone from an Irish nationalist family. Thus when my Dad walked into the room after my entry into the world (Fathers did NOT go into the delivery room in 1951 in The Bronx) my mother coyly basked, "How do you like our T.J.?" And it stuck.
But... I thought my name unique in the USA for decades until I traveled in 1982 to meet the family ion the other side. Walking up Grafton Street in Lindy one afternoon, I heard someone call 'T.J.!" I turned around quickly and so did a dozen other men. T.J. is a VERY common name in Ireland and now in the States as well.
Late to the thread, but I think "J" is the central thing here. "x-J" is also common.
I once helped a friend in Maryland restoring a house over the summer. We had some local kids as laborers -- AJ, RJ, TJ and PJ. We collectively called them "The Darrells"
As in, “Here’s my brother Darrell and my other brother Darrell?”
Exactly.
They were good kids, very rural -- one guy had always walked to school with a .22 rifle in case he spotted some small game on the way. Checking the rabbit snares too.
A few had grown up pretty rough, the fact they were still fundamentally good people, despite some dire circumstances, really impressed me.
WASP businessmen in the earlier part of the 20th Century tended to be named John or James or William (but saying the initial W takes more syllables than saying the full name) and have not uncommon surnames like Smith and Hamilton. So they tended to use their middle initial and sometimes both initials became a kind of knickname for them.
Calling business executives J.D. or J.T. was a thing in the postwar era. It's parodied in the Broadway musical with the late Robert Morse, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It's chummier than calling them, say, "Mr. Rockefeller," but less presumptuous than calling them Jack or Jim.
I've used the username "thequux" online for the last two decades, give or take, and I've never been fully comfortable with my given name. Unfortunately, "the quux" sounds very egotistical when used as a name, so I shortened it to "TQ", and that's how pretty much everybody but the governments and my bank know me. It does have the benefit of being short and relatively unique, but it does frequently get mistaken for "TK" by Germans. I've never quite understood why.
I know a woman whose first and middle names are Mary Kate, she goes by MK
I know a BB (female), JF (male), JT (male), PJ (male)
ee cummings
A couple whole generations of British men used initials as their bylines, especially but not solely authors. Not universally but with extraordinary frequency. Many of them have been named here: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, G.K. Chesterton, W.H. Auden, P.G. Wodehouse, A.A. Milne, W.B. Yeats, T.E. Lawrence, H.H. Asquith.
I think they were taught to write their names this way at school, and then just got used to it and kept it up. I've never seen this point discussed, though.
But they don't qualify for what Scott is talking about, because so far as I know, none of the above were known to intimates by the initialisms. Auden and Milne were known by their first names, Wystan and Alan. (Auden was very proud of being the only Wystan he knew - it's an Anglo-Saxon royal name that his father, an antiquarian, liked.) Tolkien was known, when a first name was to be used, as Ronald, his first middle name, although he had school friends who did call him "J.R. Squared" as a joke. Others used nicknames: C.S. Lewis was Jack, P.G. Wodehouse was Plum; in both cases they hated their legal first names (Clive and Pelham).
I knew you were going for J. But off the top of my head without thinking too hard: P. G. Wodehouse, E. O. Wilson, V. M. Straka, MJ Watson, B. F. Skinner, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, D. H. Lawrence... yeah, British people mostly.
I think a lot of people want the feeling of having chosen their own name, but don't want to do anything too weird, so they'll find a way to derive their given name into a nickname they think is still normal. Why the popular ones got popular in the first place I don't know, but the J prevalence is probably due mostly to the historical abundance of J names. This goes for the CJs and AJs, too - I swear, when I was growing up over half the guys I knew had the middle name "James", and that's just one J!
In high school, I went by [first initial][last initial]. Not sure how it started, but I liked it more than any other alternative I could derive so I let it stick. I just go by my first name now, though.
Counterexample: my full name is Charles Jackson Paul, but I have never gone by “CJ.” I do, however, sign most of my emails “C. Jackson Paul”
In portuguese, I can only think of examples with J as well: JP (João Pedro/Paulo), JC (João Carlos) and JM (João Marcos). The only common exception is PH (Pedro Henrique).
(I'm obviously ignoring soccer players, some of which are commonly referred by their initials + shirt number. E.g., Critiano Ronaldo is CR7.)
>"But then how come there are so few JNs, JLs, or JS's? Some people at the meetup thought those combinations sounded less melodious than 'JD', but I’m not really feeling it."
I am. "Jay Dee" and "Jay Tee" both have a consonant sound after a vowel sound. "Jay En", "Jay El", and "Jay Ess" all have a vowel sound after a vowel sound.
(So does "Jay Arr" though, but otoh I don't think I've ever heard of a JR apart from JRR Tolkien.)
J. R. Ewing? To be fair, he’s fictional.
i can think of several famous basketball players (KG, KD, AD) who go by first + last initial when the two flow in a similar pattern to some of the common J pairings. Can’t think of any who go by such pairings when they don’t flow that way. I suspect being a famous basketball player makes it fine/advantageous to have an unusual two-letter pairing, but people still gravitate to similar sounds because they really are linguistically satisfying.
> Maybe there’s something linguistically satisfying about JD and CJ that seemingly similar sounds like KP and DA don’t have.
KP is well attested as a nickname for Kim Possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6scHgACSD0#t=110
> Consider people who go by their first and middle initials
I "knew" someone called JT (never actually met him), but in that case only the J was an initial. It stood for "James the Third". Other double-letter names in my life have been AJ, CJ, and JJ.
My instinct says that such a name shouldn't end with a vowel. But I wouldn't be surprised by e.g. an LZ. I suspect that the uneven distribution is, as you suggest, driven more by which people are willing to use letter names than by which letter names people are willing to accept.
To be fair, even as a non-native English speaker I still feel I agree with the melodious hypothesis: those examples just sound better to me. I suppose I might be just as conditioned as people who've heard these names from infancy, but I think I can still tentatively buy this hypothesis.
Curiously, the only person I knew back in Portugal who went by initials was a CJ (pronounced similarly to "say jaw-tuh"... I'd be surprised if this were related to the English phenomenon (plus it's just one data point), but there's that.
Interesting - my own observation years ago was that it's common when the *second* initial is a J, and very uncommon otherwise. I have a PJ in my family, and I've come across lots of people (and fictional characters) called PJ, AJ, TJ, CJ, DJ, BJ (even though it sounds rude), and so on. Mainly men, but not exclusively.
I was surprised to hear you say it's also common when the *first* initial is a J. I don't recognise that at all, but maybe it's a pond difference (I'm in the UK).
A handful of counterexamples, though:
* I know a woman called Mary-Ann who goes by MA in everyday life (and she does have an MA degree, although she didn't when she first started going by the nickname)
* The character AK Yearling in My Little Pony, who goes by AK in conversation (although maybe that doesn't count because she's obviously named after JK Rowling, even though Rowling doesn't go by JK)
* A former Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, called PW Wood, who apparently was addressed as PW in everyday life, despite the awkwardness of pronouncing "W".
My first name begins with the letter <G>, and I've often thought that my name sounds particularly euphonious when rendered as "G. <Middle name> <Surname>". So maybe there's something specific about the "j" sound that makes it well-suited to English initialisms.
This pattern is not common in Poland, probably because our names for letters are much less catchy.
However, I know about at least one Andrzej (spelled 'Anjay') whom everybody started calling JJ at some point, although I don't know how often something like that would happen if they didn't hear about any JJs in the anglophone world.
Anecdata, I have one family member who goes by his first two initials, and it's "JO," which fits the "J" theory, although his stated reasons are not liking his (somewhat unusual) given names.
I guess the prevalence of J_ doesn't shock me--it does sound melodious when pronounced, but also J is the most common first initial, so we would expect more J__ than anything else even if people were choosing to initialize at random. (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/347668.html) It's also particularly a more common first initial for men, and I going by your first two initials is a bit more masculine-coded.
Fascinating. I'm a CJ myself, and was probably inspired by the CJ in 'The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin' - a BBC comedy back in 1976.
I bet there'd be a way to gather a large dataset on this rather than relying on subjective impressions.
On my street there was a very Catholic family with two sons. Both sons were named John Paul and one went by JP in order to differentiate them.
In my Jewish day school, one in four boys in my class were Bens. They got creative.
Although to be fair most were firsty-lasty and I never heard any go by their initials. One went by his middle name for so long that I didn't even know his first name was Ben.
English has a lot of names but very few words that start with a J. Maybe that's part of the reason why it works well with initials - there are few actual initialisms (or whatever they're called) that one could be confused for. As in: it's clear why nobody would want to go by "BS" or "BO" or "PP" or "OD", etc., while there are few such cases that feature the letter J.
I don't think I've ever met a JD. AJ, CJ, yes, JR I've heard of, JD not at all.
And then there is Izaak Maurits Kolthoff the analytical chemist. Chemistry grad students would roam around Koltoff Hall with their steaming thermoses of liquid oxygen wearing “I M Koltoff and you’re not” T-shirts under their lab coats.
I know one Danielle who goes by "Dee" almost exclusively IRL, and have a colleague named Dan who signs his emails and IMs "-d" (not just a boilerplate signature, he types it). Apart from those, it is generally Jays of various kinds.
There's a slight variation though where the first letter is pronounced in English the same (or nearly the same) as the actual first syllable of the person's name. I know a Celia who's often called "Cee" and a Beatrice who's called "Bee". Those feel more like shortening Emily to "Em", but for ease of typing electronically they often are written with just one letter.
I go by "DJ" and have since I was born. The reason being that my D first name is one Grandpa's first name and the J middle name is the other Grandpa's first name.
The husband of one of my aunts went by JT. He was the only person I've ever known who went by his initials, so that's a data point.
JH here... Tongue in cheek..... I notice that it seems especially American (USA) to abreviate and shorten given names. Who doesn't call Robert Rob or Bob? Mike instead of Micheal (except my gay friend Michael ;-). We're an informal country and don't want to waste our breath being overly respectful. My Nebraska in-laws finally confessed they didn't want to call me by my given and preferred name James; they preferred Jim, and I was pleased to think that Jimbo or Jimbob would be too much effort for them.
I'm unlucky enough to be a KP. Had my grandmother insisted on my great-grandfather's real name (Jakob) at my inception, instead of his nickname (Koby) I would have been a JP. My life would have been different, but I don't know how. A literary note: Some publishers used to think a female author might sell more books if she used initials or, in one famous case, a gender-neutral middle name. Would 'To Kill a Mockingbird' by 'Nell Lee' have been taken as seriously or sold tens of millions of copies? Toni Morrison, on other hand, may have had it both ways.
My first and middle initials are JM — I don’t introduce myself as JM, but my family refers to me that way. Also, my father, late grandmother, and son all have the initials JH, but only my son gets referred to that way. I think it’s a family thing — kind of a nickname, and partly to differentiate people with the same first name.
I know a Charles Cameron who sometimes gets called “CC.”
What about TC Boyle?
Funny, I observed a similar thing in Germany. I know JTs and JPs. And they are pronounced in an English/American way.
I think it is because their double name, eg Jan-Thomas or Jens-Peter would be too bourgeois/aristocratic, especially in their youth/ teens. So it stuck by them. And yes the English j sound does sound smooth and cool.
I'm surprised to see that. I knew a German girl who spoke very good English except that she couldn't pronounce J or Th. (Her name was Jenny, but I don't remember how she pronounced it.)
There was a long time when John was very dominant as a first name. I think that may have cemented the J thing before other names became more common. Now it's just a tradition.
As for the other involved letters, I wouldn't be surprised if the phenomenon is most common where both the first and middle names are common. JD = John David + others adopted since JD is now familiar?
The real question is, why are dual-initial nicknames so much more common for men than women? Aside from writers who use initials on their books, it's very rare to see a woman using one.
The only predominantly-female one I can think of is K.C., but that's because it sounds like "Casey" (which is mostly a girl's name, though it's gender neutral enough that it's not weird to see a boy named Casey). And even that isn't especially common. Maybe M.J. as well, short for Mary Jane (owing to Spider-Man and/or weed culture?), but that's iffier.
I knew a KC, but it was an abbreviation/Anglicization of "Kseniya."
I would compare this pattern to how irregulars spread in the English past-tense, as described in Pinker's book, Words and Rules. He talks about how we generalize from irregulars in a kind of statistical, family-resemblance fashion. For example, "wear" took on the past tense "worn" by analogy with "bear."
Similarly, once "J" got established as something common in names, it could spread because names gain the statistical pattern/ family resemblance of having "J" in them. It sinks in that this is a pattern names can take, and so other people follow the same pattern.
The point: this may just be the result of how patterns spread in language.
"No longer will I be known as Homer J. Simpson."
"From now on, I will be known as...Homer JAY Simpson!"
This is US-specific, but it used to be much more common to name your children after presidents. Andrew Jackson was a very common honoree, as was Thomas Jefferson. They inspired several generations of A.J.s and T.J.s., and I wouldn't be surprised if they wore a groove for those two combinations. G(eorge) W(ashington) was of course also incredibly popular but that doesn't seem to have stuck. In that case I suspect the two-syllables made for better nicknames than the four in G.W. Easier to just call the kid George or Wash.
I'm a "Jon", and have had multiple friend groups over the years independently converge to calling me by my full name, "Jon Simon". Their reasoning was basically that "Jon" sounds too generic, and the full "Jon Simon" rolls off the tongue well.
I knew a JL when I was a kid. He was famous for being absurdly good at our school's most popular recess game.
(To clarify, I didn't know him personally, just knew his name due to fame)
I am familiar with three “JC”’s. Not including myself. All different social circles. And I’m not a popular guy. Each is the first name-last name abbreviation.
My given name is Donald (like the duck) Howard (like the duck). I went by Donnie most of my life. After Trump ran for president, I got tired of people assuming that my sharing his name would make for fun small talk. So I started going by D.H.
One surprising finding: baristas and customer service reps asked me to repeat "Donnie" to make sure they heard it correctly about 60% of the time. The rate when giving "D.H." as my name is close to 0%.
But I'm not sure I would have felt it was a realistic option if D.H. Lawrence hadn't already existed.
In South India, men will use their initials irrespective of the specific letters. This is true in modern and traditional (post-colonial) context. DK (Dinesh Karthik) and KL (Kannaur Lokesh Rahul) are Indian cricket players, many prominent musicians use initials as well. This is probably to save time because South Indian names are notoriously long.
I long noticed it, but only thought of it about where the J comes second. Here's the catalogue of "second J" names like this I know of (of either personal acquaintances or famous people, in books, etc.)
AJ
BJ
CJ
DJ
EJ
GJ
JJ
LJ
MJ
NJ
OJ
PJ
RJ
TJ
VJ
YJ
Perhaps "J" isn't that common a letter in abbreviations of everyday things and institutions? So when you initialize your two first names it doesn't sound wrong? Per example: "DA", "SA", "BS", "FL", "CA", "MS", "AA", "NO" all make me think of something else, so they might expose the name to ridicule; "JJ" and "JC" and "JD" do not.
The commonness of CJ hits me a lot—I'd estimate around three-quarters of people I introduce myself to as "CZ" (initials of a Chinese name) think my name is "CJ" and it normally takes me two to three attempts to correct them, drawing the second letter in the air and pronouncing it emphatically as "zed" before explaining that "zee" and "zed" are equivalent and I respond to both.
Reason for initialising: "Chuan-Zheng" is a mission to pronounce for English speakers (I grew up in New Zealand), and although I stuck with the original until around the end of high school, eventually I started letting people call me by my initials to make things easier, and to evade questions about an "English name" or having people attempt to shorten it to "Chuan" (which my family is particular about not permitting). I suspect this is an unusual case though, at least in the context of JDs, JJs, CJs and AJs.
It's worth pointing out that names like AJ or JD are not so often the choice of the person named and more often the choice of parents and peers. Though this may simply reintroduce the same problem at a different etiological level, there is a slight difference in naming intent from others versus the self. J names are the most common by far in the English speaking world--one source says 11%--so giving others an initialization may be a way of creating greater distinction. Though almost all initializers are J's, not all J's are initializers. The Linguistic device could simply be an outgrowth of the original purpose of naming: distinction.
In American Football, the Watt brothers were named Justin James (JJ), Trent Jordan (TJ), and Derek John (who does not go by DJ). JJ Watt and TJ Watt are All Pro and signed $100M+ deals. Derek Watt has not done as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One of the few people I know who does this is my house mate PC, and that's mostly becuse she has a malaysian name and lives in an english speaking country, so PC is more familar to most people. I suspect the observation you are making is dominated by the fact that J is overrepresented as the initial of names (anecdotal experience, I don't have any evidence to back that up.)
Not many of these begin with consonants whose pronunciation begins with a vowel sound (F H I L M N R S X).
I haven't seen much mention here of double letters, like BB. These seem fairly common,. Sometimes they get rewritten, as with DeeDee. My first name is Jay, and I've often been called JJ, even though my middle initial is not J, so maybe I'm overly aware of this.
I don't feel that this conversation can be complete with Bubba. For that matter, GiGi & DiDi too (Grandmother and or Great-Grandmother - depending...).
Then all the variations on Shakespeare's first name seems adjacent, when you have Willy & Billy & Will & Bill & Gil & Liam & Pim & Buddy & Bud.
Santiago to Jimmy & Jim.
Seems like some of it can trace back to the power of names; don't tell them your right name, no, no, no! Did it start with the old writings that skipped vowels? (Yes, this whole is mostly in jest, but especially this last.)
We also have the triple-initial folks, such as the famous and totally historical P.D.Q. Bach.
My grandmother used to call me JW, my initials from my first and middle names. But she only did it when I was in trouble. It never occurred to me to adopt it as my name, but I wouldn't have hated it. It almost actively avoids rolling off the tongue like JD, but that's part of the allure for me.
My real first name begins with J, and I've had a series of "J-something" nicknames all my life. It's just a syllable people really, really love to say. Always struck me as odd that myself and my fellow Js got the treatment and no-one else did, and I love that I'm now reading a post by a non-J dedicated to such a specific little facet of my life, and in ACX of all places.
More data for the pool:
I don't know anyone who goes by "JD". I know a JT, JP, MJ (her first name is actually Heather), RJ, and CC.